Corrected date: WNMU presidential candidate No. 2 - Carlos Rey Romero

At the community session on Friday, Feb. 27,2026, to meet the second Western New Mexico University president candidate, Carlos Romero, Regent Dean Reed again reminded people of the QR code on the large poster at the front of the room in order for participants to give their impressions on the candidate's presentation.

Reed emphasized that the deadline was midnight on Wednesday, March 4, after the fourth presentation that afternoon. The results go directly to the search firm, Anthem, which compiles the statistics and provides them the next day for the regents to choose their No. 1 and No. 2 candidates to make offers and negotiate with.

The new president will be announced at a Regents' meeting set for March 17, 2026.

"Why do we need two, you might ask? Reed said. "Well, one of our five already withdrew, so when you do a search like this, these candidates are in demand."

Quite a few public officials including Sen. Gabe Ramos and Rep. Luis Terrazas attended this session, as many of them knew Romero.

Reed introduced Carlos Romero of New Mexico Tech. Carlos doctor. Carlos Romero from the New Mexico Tech. "After he's done, we will l have an open, comfortable forum where you can visit a candidate, and meet his wife."

"My name is Carlos Rey Romero, and I'm very honored to be here, and thank you for attending this. This is vital. Having such a good turnout from the community really means a lot to me. And I want to talk to you a little bit about myself and why I think I'm the best choice for Western New Mexico University. I can tell you a story of when I was a student. I was an undergraduate student at New Mexico Tech, and a friend of mine was from northern New Mexico. We went fishing on the Gila and camped and did all kinds of other stuff. We got tired of camping, and we needed to take a shower. So we checked in one night Motel Six, and we spent Friday night at the at the Drifter. If you haven't had the opportunity at the Drifter at night on a Friday night. It's an interesting experience.

"I'm originally from Española, New Mexico. Just north of Santa Fe. It's a big town in northern New Mexico, but it's a small town. At least one part of my family came to New Mexico in 1598. They were adventuresome people, and they came, and they settled a town north of Española called Yuque Yuca (spelling?). Yuca was the first settlement of the Spanish explorers here in New Mexico. My cousins are genealogists, and they study history. And one of my grandmothers was one of the strong leaders, because the men were off doing all kinds of stuff, and the women had to actually run the village. And so there were times when she had to defend the village. She had to make sure the food was being processed, that they were doing all kinds of stuff, and she was a really strong leader. So I can tell you, leadership runs in my family. Service runs in my family.

"I'm the proud child, as my parents gave me some great opportunities in life, the opportunity to go to college, the drive that education is important, the commitment to service. My father was retired from the army. He served one tour in Korea and five tours in Vietnam. And because of his sacrifice, I went to college. My father passed away when I was in high school due to service-connected disabilities for being in the war, but because of that, it provided an opportunity, and we didn't know that until I got a call, where they helped me fill out some paperwork so I could get some assistance from the Veterans Administration to go to college and that $400 a month, because my family were hard working but didn't have high incomes, was was a real sacrifice for my mom. As a single mom, she really sent me to school and provided me those opportunities. So I know how important it is to have help when you go to school.

"I understand what it's like to be on a campus sometimes when you don't feel like that's the place you belong. I went to school and was an undergraduate atNew Mexico Tech which had less than 100 Hispanic students. It is the first time in my life I'd ever been a minority. Where I grew up, we were the majority. If you're a native or you're a Hispanic, that was the majority of the population. I was in a group that I was mostly engineers. I'm really smart in math and science, and I really questioned whether I should be there. I went home every single weekend, back to Española my entire first semester. And then my mom said, 'Well, maybe you should spend a weekend there.' And she wasn't tired of seeing me or me doing clothes, or any of that other stuff. She just knew I needed to have an identity with the students. It took me a while, until I really felt this sense of belonging. They were struggling the same as I was. We were all from northern New Mexico.

"Turned out one of those people was my cousin. You never know who you're going to run into New Mexico and Silver City is like that, right? You probably relate to somebody in this room, right? If you're from Silver City. And so, you know, there's certain cultural things that are important. So as I went through my career, I began to really see how higher education can transform lives, and not just an individual life, but can transform an entire trajectory of a family. And I can tell you, I'm a huge advocate for people bettering themselves through higher education, whether it's taking a class, it's learning a skill or pursuing a degree program, because it's the one place when you're sitting in that room, it's your work. It's that personal relationship you develop with your faculty members.

"It's that passion to explore something and to try something new, but it's also one of the only times in your life when you can fail safely. It's hard when we fail professionally, right? When we fail in life, when we fail as parents or as brothers or as sisters, but in school, you get to try things, and maybe you can fail at that climbing wall because they put a support system that will catch you on your way down so you don't fall and hurt yourself. But that's how universities are, right? They allow you to fail, to try to push the envelope, to really understand what you see in yourself may not be what others may see, to explore the capabilities that you have, and that's where I developed a passion for higher education.

"My career path took me to several colleges, and when I was finishing my master's degree, and I was going to teach. I was teaching at a new community college at Highlands University. I went to teach at the United World College of the Americas, southwest of Montezuma. I visited with one of my professors in New Mexico Tech, who was actually my advisor, and he asked me, because I've asked him for a vote of recommendation to go for a PhD program.

"He said, 'Carlos, what did you most dislike of all faculty that you had? What did you like the best?' What I like the best is when faculty has industry experience it can provide me real world examples to these theoretical frameworks that they were teaching me, but gave me practical understanding of why those were important. And then he said, 'so you want to go from bachelor's, master's teaching, going to get a PhD, and why don't you go do some work?'

"So I went to go work for this agency in Santa Fe Mexico, Finance Authority. They did public finance. So I took my master's in business, my engineering degree. Finance was a good fit for me. It was numbers. Numbers weren't hard. They came to me relatively easily Problems in math were something I could figure out, and finance was a good fit. But I also had a passion for New Mexico, so at that time, it may still exist. I'll have to ask Priscilla (Lucero, Southwest New Mexico Council of Governments executive director). A lot of people in Santa Fe want everybody to go to Santa Fe and meet with them. Why would you have to drive five hours, six hours? So I said, 'we need to get out there.'

"So I started working with my colleagues at the Municipal League Association of Counties to kind of understand how municipalities in government work in New Mexico. And one of the places I came was here to Silver City, to the Southwest Council of Governments, where I met Priscilla there, and she listed, just from her memory, probably 30 things that had to be done in projects, fire trucks, fire systems, wells for mutual domestics, all kinds of things that were needed were, were priorities. And so I said, 'Oh, I think I need to spend more than one day here.' So I came back again, and I set up shop at her desk, and I set up my laptop, and I had a little portable printer, and she had meetings scheduled probably 10 entities a day for me to meet with and to go through all their needs. I met with this man over here when he was working in there, trying to do some water projects and trying to figure out what the solutions were to those. And at the time, it was, I think it was not yet Santa Clara, it was Central, New Mexico, working on all these projects and seeing what it needed. You have to go to meet people and understand what's going on and see what the issues are. And sometimes that financing is a complex problem. Meet with the city councils, meet with the county commissions, meet with the school districts, fire protection funds, all those little things. And why is that important? It's because that's part of serving a community. And when you look at a university like Western New Mexico University, they call it a comprehensive school because of the academic offerings. It's more than a comprehensive university. It's a regional university. It is a community college. It is a place of lifelong learning. So there's only a couple of universities in New Mexico that actually have a charge to have a community college in a four-year school, co-located together. Some of the universities have branch campuses. To have an integrated campus from career technical education to certificates to associate degrees to bachelor's to Master's and then to lifelong learning and come back to get retrained. That's a unique campus. So this campus is unique in how it fits into workforce training, workforce development, meeting the needs of students where they are.You can come in and take classes, get a certificate; come in and take classes, get a associate's degree; come in and take classes, get a bachelor's degree; get a master's degree, maybe get a doctorate. That's something that is needed by the community. No prohibition to it. So when I start looking in at the bones of the university, they're very strong, but there's no good measure of a university that doesn't serve its community. So there shouldn't be a divide before between from Gila or cliff to to Hurley. You know that's kind of the metropolitan area of Silver City, if you want to call it a metropolitan area.

"But really, that's good community, right there. To be different cities that you go through, but that's the community that Western New Mexico sits in, and there needs to be 100% vested interest by the university and the success of that community, because that's our community, and there needs to be 100% vested interest by those communities are the success of this university. It's only when you have that together that you have a true regional college, because then you can effect change in people's lives. You can make the community stronger and better. You can grow academic programs. You can attract students here, you can grow the student body. It's an economic engine. It's a cultural asset. Think of everything that you think of when you think of Western, a lot of you wearing purple. Some of you wore purple. Those are the colors of the institution. You take pride in this institution. You consider this one of the jewels of your community. And if you don't, I'd ask you, what would it take to make this a jewel of your community, to take pride in your institution? That's what I want to be able to do, to get the community to buy into the campus that they're not already bought in, and to get this campus 100% bought into this community. Because together, you can accomplish anything. You can come together to solve any workforce challenge. You can be any any economic challenge, any downturn in the economy, any uptake in the economy and industry changes, and things will change. You know, if you go to one of the mines here, the trucks seem to get bigger and bigger and bigger, right? And pretty soon they're going to be operating without somebody at the wheel. Well, what are you doing? Do you complain about them? But when do you do to retrain people so that people here are fixing, building, maintaining, operating, and having every piece necessary so that that doesn't get outsourced to another community? You have to fight that all the time, right?

"Rural communities in New Mexico are always fighting. Going to the population centers, we take your dollars and we spend them in population areas, but we didn't spend those dollars here. We didn't invest in the businesses here, the industries here. How do we build those up? We only build those up when we work together. So for my career, that's what I've invested in. I oversee a research center. I have two people that work there. Sitting in the audience is someone from the Playas Research and Training Center. It's a small little place that New Mexico tech did some counter terrorism training. We're building a new initiative, and the first person to visit me was Priscilla, helping me figure out the infrastructure that's there. The federal government has invested over $40 million into the infrastructure. There's fiber networks, there's all kinds of stuff trying to make that a wireless Mecca for the United States, the test bin that the entire country will come to the test wireless devices. That organization went from about seven employees to over 30 employees. Well, that's big for Hidalgo County, right?

"But the only advice is successful if it's vested in the success of the community. So with the help of Representative Terrazas, we're able to get some funding in House Bill Two junior to pay for and hire a community and economic development person that's vested in the success of the community. You can only have economic development if you have a strong and vibrant community. And the community has to be healthy. The schools have to be healthy. Social programs have to be healthy, and a university has the ability to affect that change, right? We have amazing faculty at this university, great students, the ability to train in class projects. How many students in class projects are in the community, helping the local businesses, maybe helping them write business plans, analyzing what they're doing, helping state agencies.

"You look at the some of the legislative sessions just ended, and our two elected leaders from the area, House and the Senate, would probably tell you, there were four big things that happened, whether anybody agrees or disagrees with it. A ton of money went into early childhood. Where's the Center of Excellence for early childhood care?Here, right? A ton of money is going into health professions. Which school has one of the best nursing programs in the state? Here, right? Teachers, training and retraining teachers, tons of money. The majority of the state budget goes into helping education. Which one of the best schools to come to for education? Right here in social work, we hear headlines. We review headlines about children in crisis, families in crisis. Where's one of the universities you can go to with one of the best social work programs right here? That's just people saying it. I'm not just saying that. I'm looking at the accreditation, I'm looking at the national certifications, you know, on par with the best programs across the country.

"So this university not only has the ability to help its community, but to help the entire state and the things that we are facing, the problems the state is facing, and there's huge pots of money available, and they're addressing those issues, but without a trained workforce and a retrained workforce and a retrained workforce over and over and over again, because if you're a professional and you're a licensed professional, it doesn't matter if you are an insurance broker or you're a doctor or a lawyer, you have to keep on going to continuing education courses, and that's something that Western can also do highly effectively. So when I see the future at Western, there's a lot of room to grow to attract more students to this campus.

"I'm a firm believer in place-based education. There is huge value to come here to school and have that university experience. It's also really important to have an online component, because you have to meet students in the lives that they live, not in the lives that we want them to have. So sometimes the online education is the only option for that. Or maybe they come on campus and then they have to leave and they go on school online, maybe take one class and come back. So having a university that's flexible and understands what the students need and meets them where they are, but also knowing what the community needs and meet the community where it is.

"So those are some things that are really going to inspire me. They get me excited about Western they get me excited about Silver City. Plus, this is a fun place to be. There's a lot of good people here. There's a lot of good food, right? When I go down to Playas, there's no good food. Western New Mexico University is more than Silver City. It's Lordsburg, it's Deming, it's Animas, it's Silver City, it's Columbus, and it's all those communities in between, because it serves the areas of southwestern New Mexico.

"So Western needs to be actively involved in the community to build strength, to build capacity, and to make sure that the economic opportunities that are coming down this way don't just go on the interstate past our communities, that they stop there and they provide economic opportunity for each and every one of us, and then can provide an enhanced student experience for our students, and enhance community impact by each one of our students. Thank you for coming today. This is amazing. I look forward to talking to you. I'll be here as long as you guys want to be until they tell me I have to leave."

Reed reminded people of the e QR code, or where they had the paper forms. "Please fill those out. The deadline is next Wednesday at midnight. Secondarily, the reason we do this form, every candidate has the exact same form, the exact same timing, the exact same questions from faculty, staff and students.

Romero also pointed out: "Would you say that when you think of university campus, you know they're cultural resources. Doesn't matter what campus you go to, right? So if you're at the University of Arizona, there's going to have a whole set of cultural resources. You go to New Mexico tech, it's going to have a set of resources. But if you come to Western it has unique cultural resources. You have a museum that's second to none by terms of numerous artifacts. You have a mariachi group that's spectacular, right? Many presidents have a mariachi group at their disposal. New Mexico, state, I don't even think the President has the mariachi group and that's a unique thing. But you have facilities, facility like this. It's amazing, you know, I would say the opportunity to use this university, whether you're a sports team, you're a club, church, group, any organization, this is your campus, and there should be an easy way to access facilities to go use the gym. I heard the gym is open to the community. That's great. Sporting events that are here. That's a great opportunity for the community to be here. But you have to communicate that my wife's very good as she's a very clear communicator. I think having clear communication schedules. Here are the things that we offering. Here are the dates. What are the things you want to see? You know, sometimes it's going to be something that's very boutique to a campus. You have students who make performances. So you're going to have the ability to have performances here by students, but I bet you there's elementary school kids and middle school kids and high school kids that could utilize performances here, because, you know what, families show up to see those and the community. I hope the community is coming to these student performances. They're amazing."

"It's up to the university to get that message out, to listen to the campus community and the broader community on the kinds of offering, because the facilities here, those are public investments, and they should be accessible to the public, and I think as universities building its philanthropic parts, but as you're doing that, there's donors you can bring to the table. They want to help with that cultural experience. There's foundations that are dedicated to that. And I mentioned there's many of you in this room that know how to access those levers of power, how to access those pots of money, so then working together to help write grants, to put in proposals to do all those kinds of things so that you have a richer environment here, and then getting stuff from campus out into town. I was really happy to hear that the Sixth Street School is hopefully there will be resources available so that Western can move into that.

So I think that's how utilizing facilities, cultural events, all these pieces, right? There's there's rites of passage, they're seminal events in students' lives. There's an opportunity to teach somebody about somebody else's culture. So I think we have these opportunities at a university when graduation comes, being here, being present, seeing that, celebrating those moments. I mean, it is so emotional, what that student has gone through their entire life, and the persistence, the struggles that students have. A person shared with me when they came to college they felt not included for a long time, and how they perceive you. They persisted over time and graduated in more than four years, but when they did, they accomplished something, and they changed their life. We need to celebrate those and we can do that as a community."

This author spoke briefly with Angelle Romero, the candidate's wife. She said: "I grew up in Wisconsin, and then I went to college in Washington State. I lived in Seattle for15 years, and then I moved to New Mexico in 2004. I met Carlos, and here I am."

Romero said:"The first thing I want to do, the first opportunity, is to listen and to really hear what people on the campus and in the community are wanting out of the university. I think that the biggest opportunity in order to chart a pathway of making substantive change is first listening and listening with intent."