Budget Cuts

I have always thought the price of education is way higher than it should be, especially at Notre Dame. Sure, you get a lot more than education and Notre Dame is the best place in the world and the best Women's Soccer team in the world doesn't come cheap and neither does a pretty good football team, but it is not worth $50,000. Sure, they probably spend almost that much per person per year, but they definitely don't need to. According to my calculations, at least half of it is waste.

Theorem 25: Notre Dame's tuition (including room and board) can and should be cut in half

I've been thinking about this for quite a while, and I figure now is a good time to propose my new changes. Hopefully I can get it implemented for the class of 2015. Anyway, I will list the major budget cuts now, and then when it comes time to present this to Jenkins, I'll iron out the details and list the little things.

So first things first, the faculty:

Now I know we have brilliant minds teaching our courses here at Notre Dame and I am thankful for that, but in all honesty, is it necessary? And it is necessary to have so many? I mean really, why should we hire a person who researches differential equation models on stochastic surfaces in the hyperbolic plane to teach Calculus to a bunch of Business and Arts and Letters majors who hate math? Would they really even notice if you replaced the professor with someone about half as smart? Maybe like an upperclassman who has started balding or something... Or maybe if it is a really easy class, we could use a townie?

So here's my proposal on this topic: A few HUGE lecture classes (I'm talking DeBartolo 101 filled to capacity) for each topic, each one taught by the best professor the department has, with a whole slew of undergraduate TAs. This, most obviously, cuts out a large proportion of money spent paying professors with PhD.'s and such, but it also gives undergraduates a chance to get an on-campus job that looks great on a resume. We will do this for every core subject and most uncore subjects whenever possible. If it is not possible to make 300-person lectures out of the class, the board will take a very close look at the necessity of the class. An option to keep these smaller classes in the University that cannot be made into large lectures is as follows: We put one semester's class discussions and lectures online for every subsequent semester, so that we only have to hire the teacher for one semester. These subsequent classes (that do not have a professor present) can watch these online videos together, and at any point pause the video and make comments to eachother. Depending on the available budget at the end of these cuts, we may consider adding an applet that will respond with a random comment of encouragement. This will be in the voice of whatever accent is stereotypically teaching that class (math-Chinese, business-British, Arts and Letters- Eastern European maybe?). Papers will be submitted electronically to a random number generator that outputs a random grade for the paper. The students will be told their professor is reading them.

Potential problems (or what you might think would be problems): No one will want to come to a University that has a record-setting student-to-faculty ratio of 400:1. True, but only for now. I happen to be in a Marketing class so I know a little somethin'-somethin' about Cognitive Dissonance and Comparative Trend Analyses. So don't worry about that. Just be aware that I might be putting a different spin on those awesome TV ads that you see for Notre Dame that show people all over the world making a difference. Before long, it will be cool to have a high student-to-faculty ratio. Another problem: we only have one Debartolo 101, so where will we find these huge lecture halls? A few answers to that: Stepan, JACC, outdoor venues such as the football stadium and any of the quads. Also, we will have a number of classrooms in, say, second floor DeBartolo in which the same course will be taught at a given time. Live feed of the professor will be broadcast in each room for the students to follow the lecture. Problem: how will those students ask questions? Already way ahead of that. Solution: they will not. In the next theorem, I will present a revolutionary educational model in which students are never required nor encouraged, nor really allowed (except on special occasions) to ask the professor a question. It's mind-blowing. Final problem: we have wonderful professors that cannot all teach the same thing. I decided to take a look at the professors I have had in the math department to see if this is an accurate claim. Rather than list off the names, I have determined we can get by with Diller, Migliore, and Yu Xie to teach the entire math curriculum. I will be applying to take Polini's job for one-fifth the pay because I have it on record that she scares the children. That makes a total of 4 faculty members for an entire department. Not bad I say.

And now we be rolling, let's keep it going.

Technology: Now originally I was going to eliminate the overhead projectors in all the rooms, but now that we will need them for the live feed, I guess those will stay. However, we will not update past Microsoft 2010 until at least 2030. It already does way more than anyone could possibly need. We will be much more conservative with all the software such as Visual Basic and Photoshop that we put on the lab computers. Those things are expensive. Smart Boards are officially banned and will never be allowed on campus. They have been proven to make you less smart. Those are the the main points for technology.

Housing: I love living in Duncan because it is new and everything works. But do I really need for it to be that nice? No. So I propose you pay for what you get. If you want to pay more and live in Duncan, then you do so. If not, you move to St. Ed's and get very low rates. Saves money if you want to.

Other employees of the university:

I will start with the employees whose jobs are most on the line: Card-swipers and DH Bouncers. I have decided to keep all these employees on board, but I would insist that their job performance be thoroughly investigated. I feel like many of them are great at their job and bring a value to this campus that cannot be matched anywhere else. However, there are others that are just coasting along. There should be metrics met by these workers such as goodbye waves per exiting customer and swipes per minute efficiency. If an employee does not meet the criteria, he/she should be put on probation until he/she improves performance. And we are not asking for much here. I just want a little oversight to make sure these employees earn their paychecks.

NDSP will be scaled down considerably. If I have an emergency, I am told to call 9-1-1. If I have a non-emergency, I call a friend. I really don't see what they do. Cut out the middleman, save a lot of money. Not to mention, I don't think they are very good at their job. Judging by the monthly crime stats that I analyze thoroughly, I have determined that NDSP is extremely reactive. Rather than patrolling the campus, they should focus on the places where crime actually happens: North Quad. Those people are evil. Also, if we eliminate NDSP I won't have to deal with Keri-Kei Shibata spamming my inbox with riveting detective work letting me know that a sexual non-violent battery may have occured in some residence hall at 4 in the morning. Tell me something I don't already know. I may have just raped Geisman in Halo last night after parietals, but no one really wants an email about it. And everyone already knows I do that on a regular basis anyway. I am convinced we can save a few grand on bandwidth alone if we eliminate these emails.

I'll be honest, I don't even know if you really pay for bandwidth, or how that works. Does email use bandwidth? Why haven't I been taught this?

On that note, the CAPP progam will be no more. Believe you me, it is painful for me to say this. But I'd imagine it is like quitting smoking. You knew even when you started smoking that you probably shouldn't be doing it, and every day you tell yourself you should quit, but you always put it off. And then one day you realize it's time. That time has come for CAPP. What's ironic is that if there were no CAPP, I would not be in this class, and I would not be typing this right now. Regardless, CAPP is eliminated and athletes are distraught all over campus. No more double-majors.

This comprises the majority of my budget cuts that come to mind at this moment. Sure, there are others, but some of them touch on somewhat controversial topics, so I have chosen to leave them out. The budget sheet for women's sports is still not set in stone...

Nevertheless, a great deal of money has already been saved. Now if you are following along at home, you will likely notice something very important. I'd imagine the devoted followers of Theorems of Life have already caught on: The budget cuts proposed actually cut $30,000/person not $25,000.

The excess savings will be spent demolishing the Office of Sustainability. The plans for this demolishion are still in the works but I have a few things in mind. I don't know if there is actually a physical building that holds the Office of Sustainability, but if there is, that needs to go. Maybe we could burn it down using Diesel fuel? I don't know, we'll decide that later, but we will need some funds to creatively eliminate the headquarters. We will also need to spend some money to replace the energy-saving lights on the quads with some floodlights. That will be especially important now that NDSP has been taken out of the mix: I want a nice spotlight on those criminals that roam our campus. We will of course turn on the air conditioner in all the dorms that have it, so that I can sleep at night. Catch-22 of the day: had I not been sweating in bed last night I would have not have been kept awake to think of this budget cut proposal to eliminate the Office of Sustainability. We will also need to hire extra OIT workers to take all Sustainability minor classes out of the class search. Those are a joke. Lastly, to make the campus beautiful, we will illuminate our first ever night game against USC entirely by Christmas lights. Blinking ones no less, but only when USC is on offense.

Stay tuned for the revolutionary new educational theorem that I will propose in my next post. Like I said earlier, it will literally blow your mind. It would have made more sense to write it before this post, but this was a present to Jenn and I wanted to make it a long one, so I decided to write this now.