The stack of lawsuits filed against New Mexico Highlands University keeps getting taller.
Paul Grindstaff, Highlands’ former vice president for advancement and university relations who also served as executive director of the NMHU Foundation, has accused the state-owned school in Las Vegas, N.M., of retaliating against him after he alerted university officials about unsafe athletic facilities and equipment.
In a complaint filed Monday in U.S. District Court, Grindstaff alleges Highlands’ regents fired him for whistleblowing and made false accusations against him in a letter sent May 27 to the New Mexico Office of the State Auditor. In addition to containing inaccuracies, his complaint states, the letter “embedded [Grindstaff] in a sweeping narrative of fraud, misconduct, and criminal conduct.”
Grindstaff seeks double back pay with interest, reinstatement, compensation for harm to his reputation, attorney’s fees, litigation expenses and other damages.
“The Whistleblower Protection Act exists for exactly this case,” Tim White, an attorney representing Grindstaff, said in a statement. “Dr. Grindstaff raised documented safety hazards that were injuring student-athletes at a public university. Weeks later he was fired without a stated reason, and then he was accused of a crime that his accusers’ own records disprove.”
Highlands General Counsel Doajo Hicks disputed several of the allegations in the lawsuit, particularly Grindstaff’s claims that the university retaliated against him by submitting a letter to the state auditor or for raising safety concerns.
“The University will not try this matter through the media,” Hicks wrote in an email to The New Mexican. “Because the lawsuit concerns personnel matters, disputed facts, and communications with oversight and law enforcement authorities, the University will not comment on specific evidence, individual employees, or the details of any pending review.”
Grindstaff’s lawsuit is the latest in a series of scandals to roil Highlands in recent months. The board of regents in May abruptly fired several high-ranking administrators, including Grindstaff, and placed former President Neil Woolf on paid administrative leave, before officially firing him a month later.
Woolf has since filed his own lawsuit against the school, alleging retaliation over a construction deal. The regents have denied those accusations, though they did admit to ousting him without cause and said they would comply with the terms of his contract, including “separation pay.”
Highlands also faces a harassment and discrimination suit brought by a former athletic director, plus formal probes from the Office of the State Auditor, the state Higher Education Department, and prosecutors from the 4th Judicial District Attorney’s Office and the New Mexico Department of Justice.
Grindstaff’s accusations, then, fit somewhere within that web of alleged wrongdoing, lawsuits and government inquiries.
He says in his complaint he made a series of “protected disclosures” to university leaders about conditions dangerous to Highlands’ student athletes, including unsafe football helmets and track and turf surfaces that had caused three broken ankles, at least one ACL injury and lower-body injuries to 28 of the 30 women’s soccer players.
Woolf and Grindstaff in late 2025 proposed a doomed $85.5 million athletic facilities upgrade that, had it been approved, would have resulted in a new track and field.
Rather than responding to his safety concerns, Grindstaff asserts in the complaint, university leaders fired him and named him in the board’s damning letter to the state auditor.
The 32-page letter accused Woolf of improper hiring and procurement practices, financial mismanagement and retaliation against university employees, among other misconduct — claims Woolf’s attorney has disputed.
But the letter also implicated Grindstaff, alleging he falsified government documents and benefited from preferential hiring practices for members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, even though he is a lifelong Methodist.
The New Mexican obtained the regents’ letter to the state auditor through a public records request and reported on its contents, a disclosure the complaint argues was “foreseeable” and harmful to Grindstaff’s reputation.
“A letter to a state oversight agency accusing a named former officer of crimes is a public record subject to inspection, and Defendants knew it,” the complaint states.
Grindstaff’s complaint describes the letter as “an attack document rather than a compliance submission” that “accuses a lifelong alumnus, former football student-athlete, major donor, and former volunteer officer of the very Foundation at issue of defrauding the institution he has spent decades supporting.”
Hicks, in his email to The New Mexican, wrote the university “supports good faith reporting of safety, compliance, and financial concerns” and “does not retaliate against employees for making protected reports.”
The university submitted the letter to the state auditor “in response to an official inquiry” and as part of Highlands’ “continuing cooperation with authorized oversight agencies,” he added.
“Personnel decisions are based on legitimate institutional considerations and are reviewed in accordance with applicable law and University policy,” Hicks wrote.
