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

12 Upvotes

77% Upvoted

20 comments sorted by

View all comments

5

u/Ischaldirh 10d 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.

7

u/HiTechRedneck 10d 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 9d ago

Preach.

I get that NM isn’t one of the richer states in the union, but fuuuuuuuu…