Column:

Natural selection would solve university budget crisis

By Charles Austin

Published Jan. 26, 2009

As a wise man once said, the fundamentals of our economy are strong, or at least, they still exist. But otherwise, the economy basically sucks. This is why our president and chancellor e-mailed the student body shortly before winter break asking for ideas on how to keep the university operating with a drastically reduced budget through fiscal year 2010.

This was a smart idea on the parts of UM system President Gary Forsee and Chancellor Brady Deaton because if anyone knows how to live on an incredibly small budget for a number of years, it's college students. The chancellor provided a link where students can submit their ideas to him, but my ideas are so groundbreaking they deserve exclusive publication in the fine pages of The Maneater. If Chancellor Deaton wants my ideas, he's going to have to sit through this whole column (and then pay me 15 percent of the university's state funding in royalties).

As we all know, the university has grown in record numbers this past year, with the largest class of incoming freshmen the school has ever seen. This was just fine six months ago, when the economy was stronger and our football team could still beat Kansas. But now we find ourselves with a reduced budget that can't sustain so many students and a football team that has many freshmen wondering why they even bothered to come to this school in the first place.

Now, don't get me wrong, the latter part is a good thing. Maybe we can encourage a few hundred students to transfer to Oklahoma, thus raising the average student IQ on our campus by a few points.

But even with our school's most mindless football aficionados out of the picture, we're still overcrowded, which is why putting condom dispensers in the dorms was a bad idea. Never mind the funding that was wasted on a product that's already available not only at stores everywhere, but even directly on campus at Pershing Commons. The condom dispensers are one of the biggest problems facing our economic situation today because they're going to keep stupid and lazy people from dropping out of school.

Most intelligent people, or at least people willing to take a five-minute walk, already used condoms before their implementation in the dorms. But now, our campus' worst and dimmest students have easy access to birth control, which will severely hinder their ability to get each other pregnant and drop out of school when they don't have the money and time to take care of a child while also blowing off class to play "Rock Band."

If we take the condom dispensers back out of the dorms, we can hopefully weed out the students we don't want here anyway, thanks to a little process that God likes to call "natural selection" (it's in the Bible, folks).

If all else fails, we could always bring back the tried and true methods of corporal punishment. If we allow professors to hit students for providing stupid answers, we could eliminate crybaby idiots who keep speaking up to voice their ignorant opinions. In addition, this would bring in a torrent of donations from alumni, as our grandparents' generation would be thrilled to hear that the old, more effective methods of teaching from yesteryear are being brought back to our university in a big way.

So, Brady Deaton, if you want our school to stand strong in these hard times, I suggest we stop treating students like the lazy, worthless slobs we truly are, and raise the expectations high enough to weed out the crybabies and non-condom-wearers.