When you compare the work time lost to furloughs to the amount of time currently being spent on discussing how to cut the budget, you would probably come out ahead with furloughs. And professional staff will continue to do the work that needs to be done, despite having to take mandatory “days off.”

Second idea: Stop tearing down and putting up buildings. If the hemorraghing of faculty positions is not staunched we will have a lot of empty new buildings, with no one to teach in them. And why replicate the same mistakes of the 1970s: putting up badly designed, poorly built buildings that we now have to tear down because they were built by the lowest bidder? Just ask maintenance staff which buildings need the most work; it is generally the new ones. It’s time to turn John Wiley’s building-binge supertanker around. The argument that “the money for buildings comes from a different source” just doesn’t hold up in this economic climate.

Although I understand the need for a well-rounded education, I believe that each department should re-evaluate the necessity of certain required courses. Students’ time and effort should be devoted to gaining marketable skills in their chosen area of study, not taking an irrelevant classes that somehow found its way into their curriculum.

Students with a business idea can apply for free office workspace for one year, and a variety of entrepreneurial resources and workshops are available to the tenants and other interested students. For more information check out the application criteria at the website, http://www.asm.wisc.edu/sbi.html.

This serves as an example of a situation where there is a great resource already in existence that not many people know about. A lot of costs and difficulties students deal with could be reduced by increasing student awareness of the resources that are available.

While all of the information is out there and searchable on wisc.edu, organizing the information into a one-stop feature such as a comprehensive online database of campus resources might help provide solutions to members of the campus community while expediting innovation and learning by reducing the time spent locating resources. Automatic update emails could prompt students to review any additions to the database, and new students could be made aware of its presence during SOAR.

Simply knowing about a resource could reduce the costs of attending for students. It is pretty hard to take advantage of free or discounted resources if one does not know that they exist.

Streamlining information in this way could help alleviate the underlying issue of perceived obstacles. As a student, it can be fairly intimidating to pursue an idea regardless of how good may be because it is difficult to know what has been done and what is possible. A resource or a system that functions to help eliminate that uncertainty would create a culture that more readily enables creative solutions to the University’s challenges, economic or otherwise.

As an aside, an incentive program could be created that challenges student organizations to find cost-cutting solutions. If a student group manages to find a solution that reduces costs for the University, that student group could be rewarded by receiving a small percentage of the University’s realized savings for its own initiatives. It would be a way to help finance student groups with valuable goals while also addressing the budgetary issues the University faces without spending new money.

Turn off computers at night at a set time or after a set time of inactivity unless they are recording research data or are acting as servers.

Have profit centers, such as the clinical departments in the Medical School or portions of the Athletic Department, share more of their profits with the rest of the University.

A degree is only as good as the learning that led to it. Reducing college attendance and courses just fosters a “hurry up and get it done” perspective on education. Too many people leave college with a degree and little preparation for professional work (this is both content knowledge and application); reducing academic work would only exacerbate this problem. As the requirements of many occupations increase, so too does the preparation needed to thrive as a college-educated professional.

Rather than reduce requirements, academic departments could work toward ensuring that all required coursework does indeed contribute to a students’ competence and readiness for professional careers, and that teachers address the actual educational needs of the students.

1. On increasing donations: People give to specific tangible causes. This is especially the case when they can feel some sense of direct responsibility for a donation outcome. Put differently, people will sponsor a specific child in Africa but will not donate to general African poverty. Despite this general well know finding my three Alma Maters all send me requests for donations that are either completely general or are for a specific cause (such as a new building) that is so large that I will never feel any responsibility for it, or connection to it, should I donate. Yes, they basically ask me to donate to poverty in Academia and I find myself choosing not to do so on an annual basis. Meanwhile, while relentlessly denying these schools any money, my wife and I are actually busy donating to all manner of specific projects. We built a local school a new garden, bought a hive of bees for a Polish town where relatives came from, and bought a local school class cameras for a nature trip. It’s not that I don’t think the schools I attended are unworthy, they just don’t give me reasons I can get excited about.

It seems to be an effective annual donation request letter would give as examples a handful of specific projects donations of various amounts could fund. Maybe A new computer in the Business school computer lab is $1800, seeds to grow 10 rare plants in the agricultural school might only be $140, while a new cutting edge piece of science equipment is $47,000. Said letter would direct donors to a website where 100′s more specific tangible campus causes would await funding. A little subsequent feedback (pictures of your funded plants growing, equipment installed) and next year repeat donation rates might surprise a few people.

Bottom Line: Unless UW is already ahead of the curve here, my guess is that that annual letter to alums for financial help could be a lot more persuasive.

2. (This one is really random!)On Competing State Funds that are lost to education. Clearly we cannot control or directly influence State incarceration policy. That said, lobbyists sometimes have a useful role and lobbyists with a compelling story can occasionally move mountains. I am sure arguments have raged about why a disproportionate amount of money is spent in WI on incarceration, and I am sure people have lobbied to change things to no avail. None of this is to say that change is not possible. Within the walls of academia a lot is known about how to craft highly persuasive massages, and I have to wonder if a lobbyist suitably equipped might not pay for herself many times over. Maybe we already have a team of lobbyists doing this amazingly effectively, but if not, I wonder if we should. Just because its not our job does not mean we cannot influence how it is done…..

- Look for opportunties to become less department centric and encourage collaboration on shared activities like graduate student recruitment. Consider setting aside funds specifically for shared / collaborative ventures that have documented positive outcomes.