Gold digging in a cemetery

As state funding for higher education continues to drop, the University is locked in a constant campaign to provide top-end services for its students without increasing tuition and fees beyond their already prohibitively exorbitant levels. IU is far from unique in this matter. In fact, budget crises are almost synonymous with academic institutions, for which the common adage “spend money to make money” is simply a practical impossibility. \nIn response to their financial troubles, many colleges around the country have turned to alternative methods of paying faculty, staff, subscriptions to academic journals, building maintenance, utilities, Internet accessibility and the hundreds of other costs that go into running a university.\nHere in Hoosier country, our primary source of funding, besides tuition and state taxes, is research. Grants from government agencies and private enterprises comprise the bulk of the school’s spare change. However, even all that is not enough to feed the beast that is IU. Donations and endowments such as Barbara and David Jacobs’ $40.6 million gift to the School of Music help make up a portion of the difference, as does the IU Student Foundation. You are probably most familiar with the latter, a gang of overzealous telemarketers who think begging for an extra 200 clams from tuition-paying students is not only a completely reasonable request, but in no way irritating either. \nBut we need more. Much more! The University’s tummy is grumbling, and only a brand-spanking-new ($55 million) athletics facility will satiate it. Unfortunately, those greedy northern schmucks in Purdue University’s Agronomy Department are refusing to release the patent on their recently developed Money Tree (scientific name: arbolus dollarus fictitious). \nIn other words, the University has tapped its students, donors and government and sucked them all dry. So from where is the money for the new Ashton Center going to come? How exactly do we intend to pay Michael McRobbie’s $400,000 salary and Adam Herbert’s $3,000,000 severance package? The answer is obvious. \nSince the living are all maxed out, let’s go after the dead.\nThis summer, Notre Dame University will open two limestone “Coming Home” mausoleums containing full-body crypts. Each burial site will sell for as much as $11,000. These tombs are similar to the ones being sold at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., and The Citadel in South Carolina. Duke charges a whopping $25,000 per-person fee to be buried on campus. \nBasically, we’re talking continuing studies for zombies. And the great thing about deceased donors is that we don’t have rename our facilities or even listen to stories of the “good old days.” They just fork over the dough and keel over. \nOK, so the construction, maintenance and exorcism costs may just add to our financial problems, but after two generations – when the families stop visiting – we can recycle the sepulcher and double or even triple our profit. Who are they going to tell? They’re dead. And if the ghosts of alumni-past start haunting the dreams of administrators, they’ll only be more receptive to appeals from the living, lest angry graduates enact their revenge in the after life.