Dear Professor Prodigality,

It’s come to our attention that you have exceeded your paper clip quota for the academic year. Your unthriftiness is unappreciated. As per the requirements clearly defined in the office supply request application, the use of paper clips is to be limited to only the most extreme of circumstances. Your profuse use of them has resulted in termination.

Please leave your belongings in your desk, as we cannot afford to provide your replacement (who will actually not arrive for at least a decade) with knick-knacks of his or her own.

– The Budget Deputies

Punch “budget cuts” into the online Daily archives, and more than 100 articles are queued. The first 40 of those are solely from the previous two months. Budget cuts are being discussed everywhere. The phrase is dropped into conversations regarding not just academics and administrative offices, but the M-Shop, the Government of the Student Body, the renaming of Hawthorn Court, the residence halls. Nothing on campus has escaped the buzzword.

It’s hard not to feel as if we’ve just lost our allowance. For the third time in one year, our university had to cut corners and trim budgets. The effort to run the university with an operating budget millions less than just months ago has been tremendous. And, till now, fairly disheartening.

The options offered to President Geoffroy have been bleak. It’s a strange revision of “If the world only had 100 people .” This time around it’s “If Iowa State only had $100 in its budget.” With only $100, certainly we’d have to lose more of the “frills” we’ve already seen flushed – no heat in the winter, no air conditioning in the summer; no Minority Student Affairs; no baseball; a ghost of a campus during any break.

The most recent bone of a solution, tossed by the state legislature, was faculty furloughs – essentially, forcing faculty members to take a half-day’s leave every two weeks. Without pay, of course. Sure, the numbers behind this plan are there. Starting at the lower rungs of payroll, even this half-day’s leave would total to a shiny chunk of change.

Perhaps the plan will even be effective for state agencies throughout Iowa, particularly if the rhetoric is cleaned up a bit to sew a silver lining on the grim nature of it all.

I applaud Geoffroy for not implementing the furloughs. Suggesting that furloughs are an easy way out of the budget crisis is insulting.

It reduces the profession to something as simple as sacking groceries, as if professors can up and leave the office whenever that “furlough” chime goes off.

Why stop at suggesting furloughs, even? Certainly professors wouldn’t mind using the spare time to chip in some energy for some good old-fashioned fund-raising for the university. I hear some of them can make a mean fudge brownie. Who’s up for a bake sale? Yes, it’s silly. But if we were willing to make that initial slap in the face, we may as well follow it up with a punch in the gut.

Pushing professors further into a wall to demand they take 1) cuts in pay, 2) time away from teaching and 3) time away from research, however, is a push that’s not yet come to shove. Iowa State’s professors are already jumping through silly hoops just to keep things running smoothly. The dry erase boards in Ross Hall are generally bare.

Not, though, because it is not helpful to utilize them, but because professors in the English department have been asked to purchase office supplies on their own.

Professors, tack on to your “to do” list spending more hours in smaller rooms with more students and a jolly trip to Staples at the end of the day. Or, perhaps, you can just find a stray syringe, prick your least favorite finger, and write in blood. We’d save dimes.

Cavan Reagan is a senior in journalism and mass communication and English from Bellevue, Neb. He is the news editor of the Daily.