NMSU Chancellor Carruthers to retire
New Mexico State University Chancellor Garrey Carruthers announced Thursday that he will retire next year.
Carruthers, a Republican former governor of New Mexico, took over the university’s top job in 2013, leading the state’s second-largest institution of higher learning through a period marked by state budget cuts. The university has cut staff and raised tuition.
But Carruthers has touted efforts to boost the student population and raise money.
“I have tremendously enjoyed my time here at NMSU, as a student, professor, dean and for the past four years serving as chancellor and president of this great university,” Carruthers, the only alumnus to serve as the university’s chancellor, said in a statement.
At a time when the state’s higher education system has come in for criticism from legislators at the state Capitol, Carruthers has generated decidedly less controversy than the leadership at The University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. “Garrey Carruthers has made a lot of tough decisions during his time as chancellor,” state Sen. John Arthur Smith, D-Deming, said in a statement. “He’s been proactive, not reactive, by getting in front of budget issues when no one else was. He’s pointed NMSU in a positive direction.”
Whoever takes over the Southern New Mexico institution will lead a school that had about 15,000 students at its Las Cruces campus as of 2015, with a network of branch campuses and management of the state’s agricultural extension service.