I have been informed that back at the ranch a new edict has come down indicating that faculty must now pay for all long distance calls. For context, in the region I live there are so many people and area codes that a place ten minutes drive from your office or house is probably a long distance call.
Department operating and expense budgets have been cut back so frequently that in most years the department has to use donations from alumni and industry support for basic operations like the copier. Any time there is any disruption of normal starvation funding the State provided operation and expense budget disappears all together.
Since student lab fees may only be used for "consumables" things like balances, hotplates, stirrers, pH meters, heating mantles, and stuff like that must be purchased from O&E money, which we don't have. So, every year the equipment gets in poorer shape, but we can't replace it. In the end we can't do the job mandated by the state, because the state won't provide the resources needed.
When you need to ask for grant money for stirrers, mantels or rotovaps you get comments about how the university should be providing this basic laboratory equipment. Well, not when they can't afford copier paper or white board pens for your classes.
Some years ago I switched to exams in blue books because I could save paper by eliminating all the spaces on the page that student would write the answers in. Unfortunately this means that the students often need to redraw structures, which reduces the number of questions I can ask in an exam. But I saved money.
I was never provided an office phone and had to go buy one. It peeves me to now have to pay for the privilege of returning calls to students. So, next Fall I will put in to my syllabus that I can't return student calls unless they are local calls, and that the reason the lights are off in my office is to keep my office electric bill down.
If you own a dairy and you don't feed the cows well enough you will only get a small quantity of poor quality milk. At some point you need to either feed the cows better to get the milk that provides the money to buy feed and other things, or shoot the cows and stop buying feed. Of course in the latter case you don't have cows any more, so tomorrow you have no source of income.
We need to balance our budgets, but across the board cuts only make it so everybody fails to meet their mission and never gets us out of the problems we are in. The question must be asked as to which things we should continue to do well and which we should allow someone else to do. Isn't this the point of having university system offices? We don't need to get rid of the same things everywhere. We need to build areas of excellence at each institution in the system so that over the entire system all resources are available, even in though times. In better times, everybody can do everything.
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