Cleaning out the closet

Thrift shopping in Durham is a lot of fun, especially when shopping for vintage clothes. While the hipster manifesto tells me I should pay special attention to the blazers, and, so help me, I do, what I find most fascinating about thrift shopping in Durham, particularly in the vicinity of Duke, is the T-shirt section. One can find, and I am not kidding, a complete retrospective of Duke-sponsored T-shirts dating back nearly a decade.

If it was handed out for free on the Plaza or the BC Walkway (the Plaza's predecessor where, I'm led to believe, great things rarely happened) between 1997 and 2008, you are almost guaranteed to be able to find it at Goodwill or Thriftworld. Freshman orientation for me was marred by a slight panic at the realization that I hadn't brought nearly enough clothes hangers to handle this institution of higher learning. But this was before I realized that crumpled, unnoticed residence in my drawer was only a formality in the institutional transit lines between Duke and Durham's second-hand shops.

I begin this column describing the T-shirt phenomenon for purely illustrative purposes. The real point, and nowhere can I find this illustrated more poignantly than by the rows of brand new Duke-sponsored T-shirts in the Goodwill, is that Duke has become very comfortable with excess. It's easy to blame culture. It's easy to have been swept up in the relative financial ease which was the past couple of years. Groups have been giving away free T-shirts with such fervor that they are overflowing our closets and landing, brand new, in thrift stores. But it seems we may have to put these days of plenty on hiatus.

This past week, there has been a lot of news about the Financial Crisis (which, I believe, can be fairly understood as a proper noun at this point-you saw it here first). Of course, the new bailout bill passed the Senate and, in the first display of bipartisanship we've seen in years, both Republicans and Democrats laughed as Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner revealed his new Troubled Asset Relief Program.

Back on the home front, according to various reports by The Chronicle, Duke is working in its own way to weather the storm. $500 million in bonds were issued to avoid drawing on the endowment, and a smattering of Trustees met last week supposedly to discuss the details of Duke's financial situation. Though the University may be looking at some windfall cash from the federal stimulus bill meant to shore up the nation's educational resources, Duke's operating budget will still have to be cut by about $100 million over the next few years.

But the funniest thing happened the other day. I walked into a class and my professor was puzzling over what to do with a $300 "social budget" he had been given by his department. On a grander scale, renovations have just begun on Wally Wade, the home of a football program which hasn't been to a Bowl game in 15 years, and hasn't won one in nearly 50. Oh, and also, free T-shirts are still everywhere.

We really like all of these things, and I'm sure somebody somewhere made a very convincing argument to justify all of this spending. But while I hate to sound like a parent, we also have to realize that this can't continue. Duke is going to have to use the Financial Crisis as an opportunity to learn the value of a dollar. First of all, every department must look closely at its budget. This is an occasion to look at the balance sheets and really scrutinize each line and cut out anything superfluous. The first question to ask is, "Is this spending having the desired effect?" The second question is, "Is the desired effect really relevant to the goal of this university?"

With the infrastructure of excess that we've built, austerity is going to be a little uncomfortable at first. But while the upcoming operating budget cuts will make it fiscally imperative to refocus the mission of the University, the fact that Duke might be receiving federal stimulus money adds a certain moral hazard as well. I think it would be an embarrassment to take stimulus money to cover up dents in the educational and research operating budget while maintaining status quo on less mission-critical objectives, such as commemorating every event with a T-shirt, or, dare I say, winning a basketball championship.