These are great ideas. But some people I guess will say that it's impossible to think this way right now because of the "huge money problems." These ideas aren't being presented as money savers or revenue producers. Just as good things that we used to do and could still do and could do even better. But could they also be money savers or revenue producers?

I can't agree more though about more faculty input in these decisions.

@Anonymous: I'm not sure the teaching around the table model has ever been shown to be 1) unsustainable; 2) a money-loser; or 3) a 'huge money problem,' in itself. It's true that teaching at a public university has historically required subsidies (once 12:1,now down to 1.1 to 1, state to tuition, lamentably) but I don't think there's a reason to think that the future is so bad this basic, lean but powerful, human, and transformative activity is no longer doable. If nothing else, it returns cash that then is used (routinely) to fund less flexible costs, and in this sense has a financial value beyond mere dollar count. That and we're kind of like into teaching and stuff.

I think there's also a basic, germane point that needs to be made, namely, we got caught long on a previous round of strategic investments. That is, the things we thought would be clear money makers and revenue builders turned out to be bad bets. Obviously, there's the infamous example of Global Campus. But one factoid from the Sustaining Excellence website is that 16 research-intensive buildings on campus use 41% of our energy costs (!) in ways that seem resistant to economy, because the various experiments can't be turned off (!!). And we all know that rocketing energy costs have devastated the budget recently. The list could go on.

Now, I believe we need to take gambles, and I believe we need to do big research, of the kind that can't be turned off. But we also need to be careful not to allow the quest for the big dollar to fool us into thinking that only the noisy, the big, and the new are sustainable, and the past was wasteful. At least as a hypothesis, one could say that our ambitions to grow our influence and revenue are a big structural reason for our current budget crisis (beneath the surface of the state and global financial meltdowns).

Getting greedy was part of the problem, pretty much everywhere. I would hope our attempts to improve revenues will be rooted in smaller, surer bets. We are, after all, not a corporation, but a public trust.

Yes, John. I didn't mean that what Peter Fritzsche was describing was not affordable. What I meant was that the people who will be making these decisions are asking that recommendations come as cost saving or money making methods.

You are right about needing to be ambitious in a strategic way. We should do that. But who is "we" anyway? I'd like for you or Peter Fritzsche do be helping to make these decisions. I don't know that you will or can. That seems like a big part of the problem.

I guess the basic answer to your original question, whose hooks I now understand better (thanks and apologies!), is that we begin our monetary argument by making the pitch I just made. We do make money of a kind that is quite useful via the old strategies; given a freer hand and more basic support we could do more efficiently; and these time tested (as Peter notes) strategies need to be protected in any new portfolio. The cash crisis didn't occur because the teaching mission failed. The cash crisis has occurred (it seems) due to 1) state problems; 2) national problems; 3) strategic overreach. We shouldn't self identify our core contribution as the main problem, when it hasn't been shown that it is.

Now, I happen to think that this is understood, at least in outline, throughout the university. Richard Wheeler posted recently on the subject of cross-subsidization on the Stewarding Excellence site, and there he argues that financial diversity (as in cultivating different kinds of money making) is crucial to the university's health. This, it seems to me, is a place where we can make a case.

As for what I'm doing, I'm on sabbatical and the only real committee work I'm doing is helping REEEC with its grants and helping the library work out the IAS Library model. But I've written letters to Robin Kaler, Richard Wheeler, and others on the subject of how we might think strategically about the budget, and I think it never hurts for tenured faculty to speak directly and politely, without waiting for a committee assignment.

If and when I end up exiled to Siberia for such activity, I'll let you know. Probably would write a better book if that did happen!

Here's a link to Wheeler's post:
http://oc.illinois.edu/budget/cross-subsidization.html

PPS: I always want to add that OF COURSE monetary arguments need to be made hand in hand with MORAL ones: teaching and research are what the university was founded for, and should not be held to purely fiduciary standards. If we really wanted to make money we should have founded Starbucks. The question is how to make enough money, to do what we want to do.

Hey John and Anonymous, thanks for these great comments. John, fwiw, I think you won't end up in Siberia for writing letters to our administration ;) And I'm reasonably sure that I won't go there either for editing this series of posts on Kritik!

It's great that Dick Wheeler has written at length on the Stewarding site and recommend that others check it out (see J’s link above). Of course, the hard question is how to negotiate between different demands given the various funding streams which are laid out there. I share your sense, John, that the proposals Peter F. has laid out can make sense economically as well as pedagogically.

I'm also glad that you and others are writing letters just as I’m grateful to the colleagues working hard on the strategy committees at college and campus levels. Likewise, faculty senators are providing important input.
Still, at the risk of repeating comments I made in response to an earlier post on Kritik, I'd like to add that if most of us belonged to the Campus Faculty Association (as an increasing number of us does), we would have at our disposal a democratically organized body to facilitate our speaking _to_ each other as well as speaking together as a collectivity as voices.

Letter-writing is important but 1) it's not especially dialogical (colleagues don't get to read each other's letters and letter-writers don't necessarily hear back from those they've addressed), and 2) it doesn't help us to identify, and articulate the goals and visions which we have in common.

I think that discussions among faculty (as well as between faculty and the administration) are v. important right now. So I worry about two kinds of assumptions that I hear from time to time which seem to militate against faculty discussion. The first is the assumption that if faculty were broadly included in discussions about budget cuts the result would be divisions along disciplinary and departmental lines (as faculty in specific areas rushed to protect their own interests). Now I don't deny that the problem might arise but it doesn't seem to me to be obviated by centralizing decision-making. In fact, the faculty I know who are on strategy committees worry that they can't represent the perspectives of colleagues in other fields and disciplines--even sometimes within their own departments. It makes me wonder what kinds of things we can do to spur communication among ourselves. In particular how could we arrange for discussions _among the faculty_ with regard to specific budgetary proposals, challenges, and policies that are being considered?

I don't suggest that if every faculty member belonged to the CFA that such discussion would instantaneously materialize. But a faculty-led group like the CFA could serve as a mechanism promoting discussion and diffusing information (something neither the Faculty Senate nor the strategy committees currently do). In other words, a faculty union can do more than provide a vehicle for collective bargaining (important though that goal is). It can also provide a vehicle for collective discussion and decision-making--something we lack as a faculty and which contributes to the weakness of shared governance on our campus. (LG - comment cont'd).

This brings me to my second worry. I get the sense that some faculty feel that the administration is opposed to the growth of the CFA and that they dread the establishment of a faculty union. But do we actually know that that's true? I've never heard anyone say it. (Certainly several EOs are members of the CFA and this doesn't seem to have made them in any way less effective.)

I have read of campuses with faculty unions which have done relatively well in maintaining state support during periods of financial crisis. At the very least a faculty union can help administrators to assert the importance of state support. I think some simply assume that the relation between the administration and a faculty union would need be adversarial. I don't agree. At any rate, I'm more optimistic than that. (LG)

A propos of cross subsidization, there was this in the Chronicle, a nice summary of certain concepts:

http://chronicle.com.proxy2.library.uiuc.edu/article/The-Humanities-Really-Do/64740/

(It's locked, but log in through our library to get the free copy, if you're not a subscriber).

I agree about the need for forums to talk about the implication of this complex topic!

Screaming children, gotta run.

Thanks, John. That is a great piece and one of a number of really good ones the Chronicle has published of late on the humanities. I hope by now the children have settled ;)