With the 2026 fall semester set to begin in two weeks at New Mexico Highlands University, the school lacks a key faculty member.
Bilgesu Sümer, a Turkish national and the university’s only political science professor, alleges he was pushed out after university officials reappointed him to a tenure-track position for the 2026-27 school year but then bungled the renewal of his H-1B work visa — despite having ample notice of the issue.
Friday marked his final day of work, according to a letter he received from Highlands’ Human Resources Department.
Sümer, a Faculty Senate leader who in the past has vocally opposed administrative actions on campus, described his treatment as part of a larger “culture of discrimination” and retaliation at the state-owned university in Las Vegas, N.M. The school now faces lawsuits filed by three former top employees alleging harassment, discrimination and retaliation; Sümer, who has worked at Highlands since 2022, could join them with a civil complaint of his own. He believes he is being targeted because of his foreign status.
“This is discrimination. … A colleague who is a domestic national doesn’t have this problem,” he said. “I’m not the one who created this problem. I’m not the one who can solve this problem. It is their administrative duty.”
He added, “They are 100% targeting me, and I will be continuing to use institutional and legal channels to hold them accountable.”
Highlands sponsored H-1B work visas for 13 employees from 2020 to 2025, according to data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. It’s not yet clear whether other university employees with H-1B visas might also be impacted, said Kathy Jenkins, president of the university’s faculty and staff union.
“How does this affect the rest of the faculty, the staff? … We just don’t understand it. It’s not fair or equitable,” she said.
Sümer’s plight is the latest in a string of administrative issues at Highlands, which served about 2,700 students in fall 2025, according to the latest data from the New Mexico Higher Education Department.
The regents abruptly placed former President Neil Woolf on paid administrative leave in May before firing him a month later. His departure was the first in a wave of high-level firings, which eventually cleared out the university’s provost, several vice presidents and the men’s basketball coach.
The tumult also has prompted formal probes from the New Mexico 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.
Highlands is accused of harassment and discrimination in a lawsuit filed by a former athletic director, as well as two complaints alleging whistleblower retaliation from the former president and a former vice president.
Sümer’s immigration attorney, David Jacobus, said in an interview with The New Mexican he is considering litigation.
“Moving forward, I think he’s interested in not only filing an individual suit against the university, but looking for members of a class who might be affected by HR and corporate counsel decisions at universities specifically,” Jacobus said.
Highlands General Counsel Doajo Hicks, who is currently handling media inquiries, did not respond to requests for comment on Sümer’s circumstances. However, in a letter to Jacobus obtained by The New Mexican, the university’s associate general counsel, Ruth Mariampolski, defended the institution’s position.
“The University will not sponsor or file to extend Dr. Sumer’s nonimmigrant status, and it will not continue his employment beyond the expiration of his current work authorization. … This determination reflects the University’s legal inability to employ an individual who lacks work authorization,” Mariampolski wrote.
H-1B visas in academia
The H-1B visa process isn’t unusual in academia.
The work visa, which must be sponsored by an employer, is designed for “workers in specialty occupations” that require “highly specialized knowledge” of a particular subject, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.
That often includes university instructors and professors. Data from the American Immigration Council shows more than one in five American university faculty members in 2019 were born outside the country.
H-1B sponsorship was a “normal academic process” at Highlands, too, Jenkins said.
“They’ve always sponsored H-1B visas, and as soon as the faculty member gets tenure, they sponsor the green card,” she said.
Highlands’ previously sponsored an H-1B visa for Sümer, who started working at the university in 2022. While his first year of teaching was covered under a graduate student visa, Sümer said the university eventually sponsored an expedited H-1B visa for him — though he said he still had to leave the country and delay his teaching and work assignments for a period after Highlands administrators delayed the process.
To teach during the upcoming academic year, Sümer needed the university to sponsor an H-1B visa extension, which authorizes a foreign-born worker to stay in the country and keep working for another three years. His previous visa expired July 31.
Sümer first alerted Highlands administrators he needed a visa extension for work authorization in August 2025 and let them know about a likely “9-month application processing time” to secure the extension, according to emails he provided to The New Mexican.
Sümer’s requests to get started on the visa extension largely met with silence or delays until May 2026, when the interim provost sent him a letter informing him Highlands “has determined that it will not proceed with sponsorship of a renewed H-1B petition.”
The letter stopped short of serving as a “notice of non-reappointment or dismissal,” it stated.
It pointed to “the substantial federal fees now required for H-1B petitions,” as well as the timing and administrative obligations required to file an extension request as the reasons for the decision.
The Trump administration has cracked down on H-1B visas, with President Donald Trump issuing a proclamation in September 2025 that would have required a $100,000 fee for new H-1B visas — a condition since halted by the courts.
But the fee wouldn’t have applied to Sümer’s extension to work at a public institution, his attorney said.
In an inquiry sent to Highlands officials July 27, Jacobus estimated the university’s cost to extend the visa would be only $460, excluding attorneys’ fees and administrative expenses.
Jacobus described Sümer’s treatment by the university as “anomalous.”
“I’ve never had a tenure-track faculty member get cut off like this,” he said.
Union, faculty concerns
To Jenkins — who said she’d never seen anything like Sümer’s case in 30 years at Highlands — the issue is cause for broader concern. It seems to indicate university officials can make hiring decisions based on visa sponsorship, rather than on a faculty member’s job performance, something she said will have significant but unclear ramifications for international faculty, students and staff.
“It’s not equitable, and it seems like it would play to favoritism, so we’re highly opposed to it,” she said.
Amid all the recent tumult at Highlands, Jenkins added, “We’re hopeful that all parties can band together and bring the university back to great standing — and that’s going to take open communication, trust, transparency.”
Jess Goldberg, an associate professor of American literature at Highlands and director of the university’s gender and women’s studies program, resigned from her position as chair of the President’s Council on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, citing the “structural discrimination” Sümer faced as her reason for leaving.
“If everything about Dr. Sümer’s situation of his career at Highlands was exactly the same and you simply change the one fact of making him a domestic worker rather than an immigrant worker, there would be no issue,” Goldberg said in an interview. “The singular and only reason is because of his immigration status, and that to me signals that the university administration doesn’t actually value our international community members.”
After marrying an American citizen this spring, Sümer is pursuing another path toward work authorization in the U.S., but that won’t happen in time for the start of the fall semester.
In the meantime, Sümer said he can’t continue his research.
An ethnographer, Sümer wrote his doctoral dissertation on forcible disappearances in Turkey and Mexico — work he’d planned to apply to New Mexico’s crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous people while working at Highlands.
“This is where I belong,” he said. “This is where I want to be.”
Facing an uncertain future at Highlands, Sümer pointed to a quote popularized by Martin Luther King Jr. but attributed to 19th-century abolitionist and minister Theodore Parker: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
“I’m so sorry for my students and colleagues who were hoping to work [with] me in this fall,” Sümer said. “I’ll be back.”
