By Sherry Robinson
All She Wrote

I’m going to tell you a story about entitlement, misuse of public money, poor judgment, and fuzzy ethics. The only reason we know about it is because one journalist, doing his job, brought it to the public eye. Other media outlets followed suit and the State Auditor investigated. It’s now before the state Ethics Commission.

A year ago Joshua Bowling at the online Searchlight New Mexico broke this story: Since 2018, Western New Mexico University President Joseph Shepard had spent nearly $100,000 on travel to Zambia, Spain and Greece to recruit international students and their higher tuition dollars. With him at times were other university executives, members of the WNMU Board of Regents and his wife, former spy, author and congressional candidate Valerie Plame.

“All have traveled on the university’s dime,” Bowling wrote.

Also, Shepard spent nearly $28,000 in university money at a high-end Santa Fe store to furnish his on-campus house. It was necessary for entertaining potential donors, he told Bowling. “The president’s house has to look presidential. People expect it.”

The university tab has included $12,000 to lease a 5,400-square-foot home in Santa Fe for two months and $25,500 to send six people to the Ritz-Carlton Rancho Mirage, a resort in Palm Springs, California, for a seminar that was also available online.

WNMU has 3,500 students; 64 of them are foreign. Silver City’s economy depends on copper mining, tourism and the college. The median income of its 9,300 population is $21,000, and nearly 30% of its people are poor.

Regents have raised Shepard’s salary by $87,000 to $365,000 since 2020. And they’ve ignored two red flags.

In 2019, the school’s financial director resigned. Cheryl Hain told Bowling: “As a director of financial aid who can go to jail for the s— the school is doing… this is not worth the risk to me. Our taxpayers are funding playtime for adults.”

In 2018 the vice president of business affairs, Brenda Findley, sued regents over

Shepard’s “improprieties.” He ordered raises for employees he liked and directed university janitors to clean his house, run errands, cook meals and do laundry. When Findley complained, he fired her. Regents settled the lawsuit in June with a payout to Findley.

The Silver City Daily Press published the Searchlight story, along with a response from Shepard justifying the spending. It also reported on a crowded regents’ meeting in which many defended Shepard and criticized the Searchlight story as sensational and unfair. Searchlight then said the newspaper could no longer use Searchlight material.

The Santa Fe New Mexican chimed in early this year, reporting that the state Higher Education Department chastised Shepard in a letter for not performing a cost-benefit analysis on overseas travel spending and for issuing a state procurement card to his famous wife, who is not an employee. The department suggested suspending overseas travel until the benefits could be determined.

WNMU regents blew off the department. Their lawyer wrote back that WNMU was not part of state government. Translation: We don’t answer to you.

Next the State Auditor began investigating and on Nov. 19 stated that between 2018 and 2023, WNMU violated its own policies with $363,525.99 in wasteful and improper spending. The auditor’s report got wide news coverage.

Regents claim to be addressing the auditor’s “strong concerns,” but on a performance review last summer they gave Shepard high marks plus a $50,000 bonus. And they’ve ordered an independent audit. Wait, isn’t that what the State Auditor has already done?

Here we see two kinds of journalism. Searchlight dug into the numbers of a small-town institution and wielded an outsider’s objectivity. The Daily Press covers WNMU every day and sees the institution’s shades of gray.

At a time when real journalism is under fire, both approaches serve an informed readership.

Sherry Robinson is a longtime New Mexico reporter and editor. She has worked in Grants, Gallup, the Albuquerque Journal, New Mexico Business Weekly and Albuquerque Tribune. She is the author of four books. Her columns won first place in 2024 from New Mexico Press Women.