A few semesters ago, in the name of cutting costs, several departments lost their telephones. The rationale was that most communication between professors, students and administrators these days is done by email and phones can be eliminated altogether. Along with hiring freezes and budget cuts, these were touted as efficient ways to save money.
As I stand in the shadow of the new Education building and listen to the sounds of construction from lower Johnson Field, I can reflect on how the best method for saving money is preventative: Think before you buy, look before you leap.
The University is singularly bad at this. For example, if you have ever been unlucky enough to have classes in the Centennial Engineering Center, the evidence of misallocation of funds is everywhere. The building is perfect for engineers because it appears to have been built by engineers rather than people.
Done in the best of the modern style it looks new, sleek and efficient. The building is shaped like a U and has all the modern conveniences. The desks are all very modern, as are the chairs.
Plugs for computers are everywhere and each computer lab carries that brand-new computer smell.
It is also extremely wasteful. The U shape of the building has a natural courtyard in its center, but the positioning of the doors into the building means that nobody ever uses the courtyard. Day after day, benches remain empty.
There are a number of touch screen maps in the building. I’m probably the only human being to ever use one of these, and then only because I was pretending to be in the future. I’ve never seen anybody else use one. They’re off most of the time anyway, so why would anybody use them?
Then there are the desks — the awful, nightmarish desks. If the University wanted to save money, these wretched desks should have never been bought.
To fit in with the building’s style the desks are sleek, black things, each coming with two rolling chairs, which is one too many chairs because the desks have slanted legs.
This wouldn’t be bad except that the legs of the desks slant inward, which means about one-third of the desk is unusable because the person using the desk can’t sit anywhere near the legs without constantly hitting their knees. And that means that if there are two students sitting at the desk they’re squeezed tightly together fighting for computer, book and paper space.
Let’s say each desk costs about $200, and there are maybe 20 desks per room. That’s $4,000. Now consider that there are probably 45 classrooms in the building. That comes to a total of $180,000.
Now, if one-third of a desk is essentially wasted we can assume that one-third of that money, or $60,000, is wasted. Divided among 35,000 students, the University owes $1.71 to everyone who pays tuition.
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However, it is probably best to put that money toward better desks. Better desks mean saving students’ money as well as students’ knees.
These numbers are conservative estimates, but they illustrate the idea well enough. When you consider the touch screens, the unused courtyard and the desks, it is clear that spending could be seriously cut with wiser purchases.
