(1) Favoritism and nepotism is very, very common at NMSU. Oftentimes, personal issues between permanent faculty over these issues involve their graduate students, at their expense, although it would not be right for me to spell these out here.
(2) Graduate assistantships seem unfairly biased towards foreign graduate students. For instance, American grad students are taken off of payroll for about 2-3 weeks during the winter break, whereas foreign students are not. I also have friends in engineering and math who were denied an assistantship because of a scholarship they had earned competitively (they were US citizens), whereas other non-citizen friends of mine were allowed to keep 30k+ scholarships AND given an assistantship AND given a tuition waiver.
(3) If you think that senior level administration will help you sort out bureaucratic problems, such as conflicts with other employees and problems with HR/pay issues, think again. Even if you approach them politely and with the best of intentions, they are hostile and very unprofessional. To tell you the truth, most of their email correspondence reminds me of flame-war blog postings, not the careful deliberation of an intellectual.
(4) Relatively low salary. Even the secretaries in our departments make what other secretaries were making in the late 1980's.
