Dear colleagues, 

Last week, we had several discussions about our Strategic Plan, LEADS 2025. President Torres and I wanted to revisit the processes in place to ensure we actively monitor our progress toward these goals. A small team, including the six goal leads, will begin meeting regularly to report on our progress.

Reflecting on these discussions, Goal 1 emphasizes student success and learning, which aligns with our student-centric mission. Our aim is to optimize our academic program offerings by focusing on demand, quality, and outcomes. Goal 2 highlights the importance of aligning research strengths to create integrated research centers and developing interdisciplinary academic degrees, which are key attributes of an R1 institution.

Our outreach activities, outlined in Goal 3, encompass research, connections with communities and families, multigenerational engagement, economic development and entrepreneurship, and collaborative efforts with industry, corporations, and government entities. We aim to align our resources with strategic priorities and optimize academic and administrative organizational structures (Goal 4). A key objective in building an online global campus is to achieve financial sustainability for the NMSU system (Goal 5). Our values at NMSU are reflected in Goal 6, which focuses on embedding equity, inclusion, diversity, and intersectionality into the NMSU system.

Some of our goals may seem too ambitious to achieve in just a few years, but we prefer to follow Michelangelo’s wisdom: “The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.” We are committed to being deliberate and intentional about every goal we have set. The key verbs that characterize LEADS 2025 are “Integrate,” “Collaborate,” “Leverage,” and “Align.” Let me use a flower as a metaphor. We do not want to be a collection of academic and service units doing their own things, merely tied together under the common name of NMSU, like petals bound together. Instead, we aim to bring out the synergy among our units, resembling the natural, cohesive arrangement of petals in a flower.

We aim to integrate, collaborate, leverage, and align to form a beautiful whole. Synergy is our keynote. We are NMSU.

Lakshmi N. Reddi
Interim Provost
New Mexico State University