r/nmsu • u/Weird_Nail_4648 • 10d ago
Classrooms 🤮🤢
Why all my classrooms falling apart 🫩🫩😠no ac, water from the ceiling.
What’s going on with nmsu 🫩🫩🫩 I need my money back
2
4
u/polarbearsunscreen 9d ago
just saw a video of them spending millions on upgraded locker rooms for their football players…
1
u/brereddit 9d ago
Unrelated but when you drive by the university why do they have like 5000 white trucks? Does every member of the staff really need 3 trucks apiece?
5
u/Ischaldirh 9d ago
The answer is, of course, Money. Now, the University has a lot of money, gets quite a bit from tuition, lots of grant money ends up in the Universities hands, and it should be getting a lot more from the state. I don't know where all this money is going, but I can tell you a few places where it isn't going. For example, the maintenance and facilities budget is ... not as large as it needs to be. The staff is stretched pretty thin. A lot of money is being spent to rebuild the old Klipch building, and there are a lot of buildings that really need some work - Walden Hall has been literally uninhabitable since 2020, the heating in my building was out all of last winter, I could go on.
The University also gets a good bit of money from donations. Those are always earmarked though - stuff like "Here's $2 million, but you can ONLY use it to beautify campus." That's how we got the big monument/roundabout on the northeast side of campus. Clever of the administration to find a way to satisfy the donor and also build useful infrastructure (that thing is a godsend for anyone who bikes to campus). Unfortunately, sometimes it's even more restrictive and hard to use for anything that the University actually needs.
6
u/HiTechRedneck 9d ago
The Uni gets PLENTY of money—and then they dump most of it into athletics, especially the football coach and his staff. It certainly doesn’t go to faculty and staff. They’re having to unionize just to get paid as well as UNM.
4
u/Ischaldirh 9d ago
Athletics gets a lot of it. (Unfortunately, athletics is also a popular thing for donors to earmark their money for.) The administration also gets a lot of it.
You know who else doesn't get very much? Graduate students. You know, the people who TA, lecture, and grade, in addition to writing the grants that bring in all the money, writing the research papers that ensure the university can call itself an R1 institution... those people who already have their four-year degree, and who typically work full time on campus but make half-time pay, which amounts to, oh, 'round about $20/hr, and that *if* they can find summer employment. Who, on top of all that, had to *pay full time tuition* just for the right to work, even though most of them hadn't attended a lecture for a class they weren't TAing in years, until they unionized and fought tooth and nail for five years.
Sorry. Gotta rant about this every once in a while. Ugh, this place pisses me off sometimes.
1
u/HiTechRedneck 8d ago
Preach.
I get that NM isn’t one of the richer states in the union, but fuuuuuuuu…
2
u/Dollmaker1975 9d ago
You must have classes in the old, old buildings. There are so many nice, comfortable classrooms of all sizes on campus. But the old buildings - like the ones that were already old when I first attended in 1993 have some rough rooms because, well, they are old.
3
2
3
u/BalladofBadBeard 10d ago
Give this feedback to school admin! The water I can understand, we don't normally get crazy rain like we've had, but the AC should be addressed for sure. I know you're not the only one that has noticed, and I agree it's not ok.
-1
u/mehello69 10d ago
The janitors don't do much form what I'm told. even the public schools are pretty gross. :/
4
u/TheMarshmallowFairy 9d ago
No no no. Harp on the administration, but not the custodial staff. The custodial staff are really fantastic at their jobs, they work hard, and they have always been nothing short of kind any time I encountered any of them. The buildings may be old, but in all my years at NMSU I can’t say I have ever encountered a single space that wasn’t well maintained and cleaned by them. There is a difference between old and dated versus dirty. Bathrooms are clean, baseboards and corners never have dust build up or spiderwebs, and if anything needed attention before they were scheduled, they will take care of it if they are made aware of the issue. They are not in charge of upgrading buildings, so they can’t be faulted if a classroom or bathroom looks dingy and 50 years old, but what they are in charge of, they are exemplary.
2
3
u/Lvthn_Crkd_Srpnt Graduate Student 9d ago
The custodial staff is not the issue. The administrative bloat and waste are the issues.
19
u/FitProfessional3654 10d ago
I’m going to push back a little on that. There are some great custodial staff personnel here at NMSU. With all the rains, there have been issues but generally NMSU is very well maintained. I’m faculty and love our staff especially in Domenici Hall. I will always defend them.
4
u/SethHunter 10d ago
The janitors and custodial staff have stepped up where Facilities have failed. I love the custodial staff here
5
u/senora_hipsta 10d ago
Honestly, I second this. They're a hardworking crew at all the spaces I used during my time as a student.
2
u/SethHunter 6d ago
We had an issue in our office building where we thought we’d have to replace the window due to how worn it was. But FS said they were not replacing windows this time.
The custodian got special chemicals and worked over 2-3 days and got the window looking better than new.
They’ve always gone above and beyond in my experience!
1
u/SethHunter 6d ago edited 6d ago
So - the real issue is that NMSU is $500+ million dollars in deferred maintenance. Meaning that it would take $500 million to fix all the problems on campus.
The other issue is that NMSU hires maintenance people for $18-22/hour - while the data centers, project Jupiter, and other places in town are paying $32-40+/hour for the same job (though frankly with less stress).
But NMSU offers on the job training - so what happens is these people get their training at NMSU, then after a year they jump over to somewhere in the community.
NMSU is not able to keep up with the local competition.
So there is a high turn over rate. By the time they’re able to train up new people and get them independently working, those people leave and now they’re stuck training new people again.
Not to mention they’re just generally under staffed - and after sudexo got booted from the housing contract - now Facilities Services is responsible for housing, which increased their workload exponentially.
All the maintenance preformed recently has been reactive - not preventative - which means the number of issues is only going to increase with time and get further out of hand
All of this has been stated by Neil Bohn, the executive director of operations at NMSU.