New Year, New Correspondent

You’ll see a new face when you tune in to New Mexico in Focus this week, and I hope you’ll stick around for this print journalist’s debut as a TV interviewer. As part of my job doing investigations for Searchlight New Mexico, I’m no stranger to appearing on television and radio shows as a guest, to discuss my recent work. This time I had an opportunity to sit in the other chair, and I’m grateful to NMPBS for the new experience. Special thanks to Executive Producer Jeff Proctor and Senior Producer Lou DiVizio.   

It’s been more than a year since Searchlight broke the news of the spending situation at Western New Mexico University (WNMU) in Silver City. When we published our first story in late 2023, a number of state agencies quickly announced that they were opening investigations into then-President Joseph Shepard and WNMU’s Board of Regents, as a direct result of what we found. Those state probes were — as such things tend to be — slow-moving.   

Recent months, however, have been anything but.   

In November, the Office of the State Auditor sent university leaders a “letter of concern” confirming that Shepard and others had burned through more than $360,000 in taxpayer money with “wasteful” spending sprees that violated university policies. The auditor’s report confirmed Searchlight’s reporting that Shepard’s wife, former CIA agent Valerie Plame, used a university credit card despite not being a university employee.     

In December, Shepard announced his resignation and was awarded a $1.9 million severance payment, along with a tenured, $200,000-per-year faculty position — a move that sparked outrage among university faculty and staff members. Over the past few weeks, four of the five members on the Board of Regents resigned — except for the student regent, who has said he needs to stay on so the university can make payroll — and the New Mexico Department of Justice sued Shepard and the regents over his seven-figure departure.   

On Jan. 16, the state auditor started a new investigation. He directed his office to open a probe into Shepard’s payout and to seize control of another, separate audit that had been initiated by the former university president.   

“As the university no longer has a fully constituted Board of Regents and no longer has a president, there now exists heightened probability that the forensic special audit requested by the university will be unduly and unnecessarily delayed or not completed,” the auditor’s announcement said.   

There’s been so much news on this situation in recent months that many of our readers have told us it’s difficult to make sense of it all. So, when NMPBS producers asked me to interview state Attorney General Raúl Torrez about the issue on this week’s episode of NMiF, it seemed like a great opportunity to clarify things for the public.   

There are still a number of unanswered questions about what happened at WNMU. What kinds of reform will state lawmakers consider in the upcoming legislative session? How did the regents arrive at the terms of Shepard’s separation agreement? Will the attorney general broaden his office’s efforts to look at things other than the separation agreement? 

Torrez set the stage for some, but not all of what’s to come in this story, and he laid out a few options for state leaders to ensure a situation like this doesn’t pop up again. Enjoy the interview.   

-Joshua Bowling, Investigative Reporter, Searchlight New Mexico   
This story was produced in collaboration with Searchlight New Mexico, a NMPBS partner.