You are right about the limitations of this kind of budgeting, which is why so many leaders find it easier to impose across-the-board cuts rather than go through the hard work of demonstrating that there are no free riders. If leaders do not enjoy the trust of their constituents — for good reasons or ill — they will take this route.

A good leader will celebrate the managers who economize successfully, and find ways to reward and punish people that go beyond use-it-or-lose-it budgeting. Good leadership of this kind is hard to find — especially when so many faculty decide that it’s beneath them to provide such leadership.

I would hate to see the outside examiner’s program cut. In addition to being a significant contributor to what make Swarthmore Swarthmore academically, I believe that it has played a major role in marketing the College’s brand to the academic community. 75 years of enjoyable visits has surely provoked more than a bit of word of mouth.

I was simply using the program as an example of the kinds of hard cuts that are going to have to be discussed going forward.

The transition from President Bloom to President Chopp may also be a blessing. Both are obviously familiar with the limited options to cut big chunks of a college operating budget. There just aren’t that many choices. So Bloom can do a Rebecca Chopp a big favor by being the “bad guy” on a few tought cuts on his way out the door. Honestly, though, I expect the Swarthmore community to largely accept the concept of shared sacrifice.

The court lighting case is just an example of the kinds of savings that people are trying to come up with on a distributed basis. Since we try to decentralize at least some decision-making, that leaves a lot of units within the college trying to come up with something to offer back to senior staff as possible savings. So these mostly aren’t savings ideas that are coming down from a single centralized decision-maker, but ideas that are floating up in response to a centralized request that we all look for savings. Some comparable initiatives include cutting out coffee or food at some meetings, strong reminders to shut down computers after hours, requests that we draw our Honors examiners with a consciousness of the relative costs of travel, that sort of thing. But these aren’t substitutes for thinking about big-ticket shifts in the budget–as I understand it, there’s also a lot of thinking going about some of the bigger decisions too. Naturally that’s a big complicated when we’re transitioning from one president to another.

Prof. Burke, could you put the the tennis court lighting discussion into some context. If that discussion occurred after many discussions of more substantive budget issues, then it would seem the deliberations are quite thorough. On the other hand, if that were discussed early on as the best cost-cutting idea anyone could think of, then…

Though I’m arguing for transparency in this post, I can see why it might be counterproductive to allow me (or any outsider) to look at the line-item specifics of spending. It’s a bit like the Golden Fleece awards phenomenon: sometimes Proxmire and his successors really get it right in picking out something that’s a waste of money, but sometimes they just read off the surface of a funding decision and decide it’s self-evidently silly without looking at what’s actually going on. Some of the most sober, mainstream sounding funding (at the federal level or inside a college or other institution) might be where the real waste or malfeasance lies, but if you’ll miss that if just rely on reading out from the paper record of a budget.

That said, I think a lot more sunshine would help for the reasons I lay out in this post. It’s a bit like the energy bills that are popping up in parts of the country where your own energy consumption gets compared, anonymously, to your neighbors. That’s a bit obnoxious, but if you want to people to adjust their usage, it helps them to know just how their usage compares to others. To use a local example, one part of our annual Honors examinations where we invite external examiners to evaluate our Honors students are departmental dinners the night before the exams conclude. The faculty has been asked to make sure that those dinners are kept relatively low-key and affordable this year–something we’ve been asked before, but the request has a new urgency this year. It wouldn’t be a bad thing after the expenses come in, every department got back a document that said something like, “Your department had average per capita expenses for your Honors dinner” or “You were the most expensive per capita department on campus for your Honors dinner”–something that gave you some information about where your financial behavior stood in relationship to everyone else.

Does Swarthmore make it easy for you (and others) to examine the budget? Williams makes it very hard for outsiders (read: non-administrators) to have any meaningful sense of where the money goes.

At one point there was talk of making the budget more transparent, but that didn’t really happen. It sure would make things easier now if it were.

One way to provide incentives for good stewardship is to push responsibilities and money down to lower levels, and then let these units keep at least a portion of any savings they get from improved stewardship. For instance, at my university we’re in the process of having departments pay for their own energy costs. A few years ago, energy was paid for at the level the statewide university system from a separate budget and so there was no incentive to conserve. Now it’s down to the level of the individual colleges on each campus, and already conservation measures are being taken (e.g. upgrading lighting fixtures) though, as you say, it’s not clear to me when a particular such measure is worthwhile.