Editor’s note: The following comments were sent to budgetcomments@iastate.edu and will be reviewed by ISU President Gregory Geoffroy, Provost Elizabeth Hoffman and the University Budget Advisory Committee, as they make “the difficult budget decisions that lie ahead,” according to an e-mail sent by the president to students Oct. 15.
The numbers correspond to the order in which the e-mails were received.
Contributors’ names and e-mail addresses have been withheld, as consent to publish could not reasonably be obtained.

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I don’t know how much of the budget is used on our power bill here, but one possible avenue of savings would lie there. This is a somewhat half-baked thought, but here goes:
Around the university I see a lot of lights on in unoccupied areas. These days you can get light switches that, by default, only activate the lights when a built-in infrared sensor determines there is someone in the room, and these are pretty cheap these days.
We have a tremendous number of computers on campus. Computers have a lot more smarts built into their power management capabilities. Although the expected reaction of your typical research lab might be, “No, we need our computers at full capacity,” these new, smarter power managers can do everything transparently — and can support levels of granularity down to the processor level [e.g., the processor can sleep during idle periods, which might be many millisecond bursts per second]. Most of our computers aren’t switched off at night around campus, I suspect, but they wouldn’t have to be with automatic power management. This is an article I’ve been applying at home myself recently that has some good ideas — it’s based on Linux, but the concepts are largely independent of the operating system: www.spencerstirling.com/computergeek/powersaving.
Besides the desktop PCs, most of which probably end up effectively being just souped-up e-mail terminals for students, we have these large-scale research computing farms and supercomputers [BlueGene, the VRAC, etc.] that in all likelihood spend the majority of their time powered up to do nothing. That stuff adds up over time.
The downside of either of these ideas is that there would be some materials and labor costs, so some sort of cost-benefit analysis would be needed before moving forward. Some costs could possibly be offset by somehow taking advantage of the new federal green initiatives. I don’t know anything about that; but perhaps Sen. Tom Harkin [D-Iowa] would, or members of the university staff who specialize in green technologies — for example, those folks who built the energy-efficient house for the national contest.
Layoffs and furloughs and such are most likely the quickest ways to recover the most money, as salaries are likely the largest fraction of the budget, but killing off jobs is going to be very unpopular and exacerbate the problem that got us here to begin with: The state ran out of money because of too few taxes, because of too much unemployment. Looking elsewhere to recover money would be the wisest long-term solution.

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There are many small changes that can be made around our campus that would allow it to run in a more financially efficient manner. Some possibilities include:

• Turning the AC temperature up in the summer by a few degrees could save us huge amounts of money. Many classrooms are already uncomfortably cold in the summer, so this would eliminate that problem as well.
• As a member of the marching band, I love all of the perks we receive, however, if it would benefit the university as a whole, I would be willing to sacrifice my complimentary pre-game meals. This custom was just started a few years ago, and it is appreciated, but not completely necessary.
• If the university is cutting back on its janitorial staff, one thing that can go along with that is not emptying certain trash receptacles on a daily basis. Several of these have bags that are nearly empty, and as long as they don’t have obvious odor-causing debris in them, it is wasteful to empty them.
• Many buildings on campus stay lit up during unoccupied hours, or are entirely too brightly lit during occupied hours. This is quite wasteful of energy.
• With regards to CyRide, many of the drivers engage in “jack-rabbit” starts and stops while driving or leave the doors open with the heat cranked up while at a stop with no one around, both of which lead to very poor fuel efficiency. Many of the CyRide buses are often close to empty, so the university could use more small buses from its fleet more often.
• Finally, I have noticed many student jobs across the university that seem unnecessary, particularly because many of these students do close to nothing while on the job. This seems particularly evident at the library, where I have, on multiple occasions, found student employees earning my tuition and fee money to sit around on Facebook waiting for something to happen, i.e., somebody requesting something from them.

As you can see, if many of these possibilities were to be enacted, it would also help toward our university’s pledge to “go green!”

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I think part of the problem is that we give free tuition to too many people. I’m talking about affirmative action. If we are so intent on affirmative action, then only give it to the people who are 100 percent Indian, black, asian or whatever. And they must be born in the country of their nationality, otherwise, if they are born here, they will be completely Americanized, adding no cultural difference to the campus. I am sick of hearing about stories of people who are only percentages of other races and still getting free tuition. Worse yet, they are totally Americanized because they were born here, therefore adding absolutely zero diversity to the campus.
I think making a diverse campus is a huge cost that just does not make sense in times like these, especially if the money lost to affirmative action is wasted on completely normal, everyday Americans who happen to have trace amounts of another nationalities. The money allotted to people of different nationalities should be based on the cultural difference they offer to the university, based on their cultural experience and personality, not on their appearance.
So before you raise my tuition, or surcharge me, or cut the salaries of our hard-working and well-qualified staff and professors, modify the current inefficient and ineffective affirmative action system.

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I have read many of the budget comments in the Daily and find it curious that more people don’t see the advising system as a logical place to cut. Obviously there will always be some need for this service, but a central advisory center serving the entire student body surely would be good enough.
I wonder how many other universities have the system Iowa State has with advisers entrenched in all departments and spread all over the campus. Although many advisers are put to work teaching a course, especially good as pinch-hitters, serving on committees or handling other thankless departmental tasks, most are really only busy advising two months a year — the pre-registration period, when students actually have to trek to their offices for official signatures.
When I was an adviser, the other two women I worked with conducted personal business half the week; after their course work was finished, there really wasn’t much else to do. Other advisers I met worked overtime trying to prove to their departments how necessary they were. In reality, advisees rarely had questions that couldn’t be answered with some personal effort of their own — reading course catalogs, adding up their credit columns. I rarely felt that my services were needed or valued, other than as a buffer between the faculty and the students. If a student is smart enough to get into college, surely they should be able to add up their credit hours and see what they’re missing? Perhaps, if they don’t, they don’t deserve to be here. At any rate, I fled back to teaching as soon as I could, even though it meant much, much more work. I wanted to have meaningful contact with students, not play “buddy” or emotional prop, as some see their advisers, or worse, some bureaucratic placeholder.
At any rate, I’m sure this will go nowhere because the whole advising system has become so thoroughly entrenched since I was a student here — class of ’78, with a M.A. in ’83. And none are paid well enough to pay all that much attention to, but I don’t think their loss would be much of a loss to the mission of Iowa State. Students would have to tot up their own numbers. A few would occasionally screw up, which would help them learn to take responsibility for themselves, a critical skill. A core of these bureaucratic advisers could be kept busy with students who have serious problems, but it seems to me that faculty should get involved when students have serious questions about the content or direction of their courses in a particular discipline. The numbers-toting should be done by students.

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Don’t do stupid things. We didn’t need to renovate State Gym. It doesn’t need a walkway to Beyer. Don’t overheat/cool every building so much.

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I don’t know how much of this is still under debate — reading the Daily and e-mails that come through, though, I have to expect there is still quite a bit of debate — but here are a few more suggestions:

• Parking enforcement: If we’re honest with ourselves, this is one of the most derided functions by faculty and students alike within universities. It does provide a source of student employment, granted, but it’s a very questionable priority in times of severe budget problems. If it is not a net gain for the university to leave it at its current level, it should be greatly scaled back.
• Police: I remember hearing at orientation that Iowa State maintains its own police force, separate from Ames PD. If it also is funded out of our budget, we should scale that back as well. Again, if we’re honest with ourselves, no one really cares how many open container and public intox charges show up in the Daily from week to week. Any major problems can be handled by Ames PD, and, in the end, we don’t have much of a crime problem here, and that’s mostly because it’s Ames, not because of a large police presence.
• Student orgs: From personal experience, I couldn’t determine that the student organizations office does much besides create idle rules to beat student organization officers over the head with. We should have some place to go to when we need the university’s help, but I see too much of its function as a bloated bureaucracy that could stand some trimming down to strictly a core mission to help the students when needed. Reviewing constitutions and processing “Compliance Agreement Forms” does not meet that standard, in my opinion. The majority of clubs, I’d wager, are departmentally affiliated anyway, and the departments could take care of their own. In the rare event some legal concern arises, those could be dealt with on a case by case basis by university administration.