The New York Times has been all-aflutter (publishing two articles in just as many days) with ways colleges across the nation have been saving money while faced with dwindling endowments.

An article from last Friday highlighted the little ways colleges are cutting back, including relaxing housekeeping schedules, which saved Oberlin College $22,300, and eliminating faculty landlines, which saves University of Washington about 1,100 dollars each month. Skidmore, no doubt, is extertaining similar economies: free HBO—a luxury we enjoy—was cut at Dickenson College for a savings of 75,000. Programs similar to Sustainable Skidmore’s “Skidmore Unplugged” challenge are also cited as being major cost cutters for colleges as electric and heating costs rise.  In fact, many of the programs mentioned in the article are already commonplace at Skidmore: our trayless dining, energy-saving light bulbs and (extremely) low-flow shower heads suggest we are ahead of the frugal curve.

This week The Times brings us another piece about thrifty schools: this time about how colleges are finding funds by hosting summer camps, academic programs, conferences and the like during the summer season. Skidmore’s relatively unused facilities are our summertime cash cow as groups pay premium prices to relax in our spacious window seats and practice on our supine grassy fields.

“The overall landscape now is one in which you’ve got to become leaner and meaner and more competitive, and that means trying to find more sources of revenue,” said Tim Kelly, a college spokesman. “Summer is an important piece of the puzzle.”

There is a marketing upside, too, in maintaining a busy campus in summer, administrators say. On campus tours, prospective students and their parents respond better to a vibrant environment. And a high school student who takes, say, a three-week screenwriting workshop might remember that institution when applying to college.”

Thanks mostly to the draw of downtown Saratoga’s summertime pulse Skidmore has hosted several summer camps, academic programs, and summer conferences in the past, but don’t be surprised if more strangers crowd the dining hall as the weather gets nicer.

Skidmore has also teamed up with 5 other upstate liberal arts colleges in an effort to share services and cut costs. Dubbing themselves The New York Six Consortium (don’t they know it is uncool to give yourself a nickname) Hamilton College, Colgate University, Hobart and William Smith, Skidmore, Union, and St Lawrence University are hoping to take advantage of economies of scale* and save some money on larger purchases. Thanks to a grant from some dude named Mellon The Six are looking to save money by banding together to pay for insurance, dining, energy, printing, technology and team up when applying for federal grants. This relationship could also lead to academic integration.

*see Professor Muhammad I was paying attention.

Evan Pasha 09' carries a double decker chicken patty with two slices of cheese and dipping sauce

Looks like our little college made it on to the front page of Wednesday’s New York Times.  While the article is about the benefits of “going trayless”, something we did after Murray-Aikins’ recent $10 million dining hall renovation, most of the ink devoted to Skidmore is spent coveting our dining hall.

The renovated dining hall has three slate fireplaces and a half-dozen food stations, including a do-it-yourself griddle for eggs. Three of the chefs are graduates of the Culinary Institute of America, and all the pasta, granola and baked goods are made on site.

Apparently Skidmore was ahead of the curve on the whole trayless dining kick which is just now becoming popular. Joe Spina, executive director of the National Association of College and University Food Services, calls trayless dining “sort of the hot thing right now.”

According to the article the decision to abandon trays at Skidmore “was mainly about atmosphere” (seriously?), but the benefits are real. Going trayless uses less water, results in the wasting of less food and lowers the calorie intake of the diners—claims supported by Skidmore’s hoard of super skinny environmental science majors.

Read the whole article HERE

Today’s New York Times featured the “Top 10 Best Books of 2008.” At the top of the list: Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories by none other than Skidmore professor/celebrity Steven “The Illusionist” Millhauser.

In his first collection in five years, a master fabulist in the tradition of Poe and Nabo­kov invents spookily plausible parallel universes in which the deepest human emotions and yearnings are transformed into their monstrous opposites. Millhauser is especially attuned to the purgatory of adolescence. In the title story, teenagers attend sinister “laugh parties”; in another, a mysteriously afflicted girl hides in the darkness of her attic bedroom. Time and again these parables revive the possibility that “under this world there is another, waiting to be born.”

An excerpt from his book is available on the Times’ website. Although this is just one of many appearances in the Times for Dr. Millhauser, be sure to congratulate him on his timeless work.

For those of you who didn’t get to read the Sunday New York Times because you were a) in Montreal, b) don’t know how to read, or c) just didn’t wake up until Monday, you missed out on a great author/book review. Skidmore’s most renowned short story author Steven Millhauser had one of his essays, “The Ambition of the Short Story,” and a biography featured in Sunday’s edition. If you don’t have Millhauser as your Fiction Writing professor, or aren’t familiar with his work, you may recognize him as the writer of the story from which the movie, “The Illusionist,” was based. You may also be impressed to know that he is the recipient of the ’97 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel Martin Dressler.

All things considered, Skidmore has more to offer than cold weather and a spot on the Princeton Review’s “Reefer Madness” list. Millhauser is not teaching any courses this semester, but keep your eye’s out next semester when he may be offering a class on how to write well and be really cool.

Tuesday the New York Times took a break from its normal rationality and published a piece criticizing the previously covered Amethyst Initiative.

The college executives are right to be alarmed about the binge drinking that besieges their campuses. But there is no proof that easier access to alcohol would solve that problem, and there is strong evidence that college administrations could do a lot more than they are doing to combat the alcohol epidemic.

~NYT

Agree? Disagree? Comments?