Your ideas can and may be used to make the university a better, more efficient place to learn, teach and work. This page is an interactive brainstorming session – a place where you can view ideas others have submitted to help shape and inspire your own common sense approach to financial strength. Each suggestion will be summarized and reviewed for cost and feasibility.

Please note: This is not an exhaustive list of ideas. Ideas are evaluated, compared, combined and summarized in the context of all submissions. Whether or not your idea appears here, all are shared (as submitted) directly with the President.

Academic and Student Support

• Install and setup of chemical inventory software to accurately gauge when chemicals are needed in the chemistry lab.
• Increase number of transfer students.
• Increase pragmatic aspects of Career Services, such as bringing more career-oriented employers to campus.
• Eliminate redundancies in curriculum.
• Offer more online classes for students.
• Offer more classes during the summer terms.
• Develop culture of service excellence to enhance retention.
• Create new academic extension programs or continuing education that generates new revenue.
• Examine decentralized and specialized student affairs programs.
• Examine academic programs with small participation.
• Reinstate the Weekend University.
• Add a sports management or sports marketing degree
• Create an incentive program that encourages faculty and staff to recruit and enroll more students.
• Schedule 3-hour credit courses to meet for 75 minutes, twice a week.
• Consider a Monday-Wednesday/Tuesday-Thursday class schedule to better use classrooms and add flexibility for potential students.

Administrative

• Charge for reserved parking.
• Phase out tuition waivers for spouses and dependents of faculty and staff.
• Require a business case for every capital expenditure and assign an executive sponsor.
• Organize the university’s operations by primary customer served.
• Centralize shared services, specifically between law school and historic campus.
• Improve employee development and retention.
• Optimize use of student workers.
• Require every meeting to have a purpose statement and an agenda prior to the meeting.
• End snack and drink purchases – often used for guests and personnel – in all offices and schools.
• End car and house allowances.
• Reduce size of President's staff.
• Consolidate faculty offices into flexible working areas and private meeting spaces for teacher/student consultations.
• Implement a university-wide telephone system.
• Be more selective in sending employees to conferences.
• Use a bidding process that would require three bids for anything over $5,000 per year.
• Offer incentives departments not to use their entire budget allocation.
• Dedicate summer Fridays to meetings, documenting processes and Taskstream.
• Use student workers for moving projects.
• Reduce the salaries of senior administrative officials.
• Utilize alumni relations to build strong relationships with donors.
• Develop a centralized supplies center that is used by the entire campus.
• Keep campus closed on Fridays during summer months.
• Dramatically reduce the use of outside consultants.
• Close the Burleson site.
• Streamline purchasing process to increase savings through promotional discount offers.
• Start a “health and well-being” program that encourages fitness and reduces health insurance costs.
• Review memberships – including country clubs – and consider eliminating some.
• Develop culture of service excellence to enhance retention.
• Restructure the Provost’s office so that deans and program directors report to the provost, and others are placed under one to two associate provosts.
• Set goals for the Advancement office to generate more funds; make Advancement office size consistent with similar-sized universities.
• Reorganize administrative assistants so their jobs are better utilized.
• Combine roles and responsibilities of distinct assistant and associate dean positions at the School of Law.
• Insurance premium differentiation for smokers and others with high-risk behaviors.
• Reduce retirement plan contributions.
• Hiring/Budget freeze.
• Freeze hiring of temporary employees, consultants and independent contractors.
• Consider voluntary retirement incentive plans.
• Freeze salary levels for administrators making more than $150,000, while giving modest raises to staff on the lower end of the pay scale.
• Rent out campus buildings for events.
• Develop key performance indicators (KPIs), institution-wide dashboards and effective reporting for each function or department.
• Review all centers and institutes and demonstrate they are serving the university's core mission.
• Hire tenure-track faculty and build solid programs to bolster Texas Wesleyan’s liberal arts tradition.
• Return faculty to teaching full course loads in their own departments.
• Add faculty satisfaction to the strategic plan.
• Trim programs in the school of education.
• Cut CETL travel budget and refocus it and IT to emphasize customer service and satisfaction.
• Identify key academic programs and develop their reputation of excellence.
• Establish department-specific scholarships to draw topstudents.
• Focus resources on top students.
• Cut Thanksgiving and Christmas receptions for faculty and staff.
• Use Polytechnic United Methodist Church for weddings.
• Develop an attractive early retirement package.
• Stop using official letterhead for internal correspondence; design an official header on plain paper and use plain envelopes.
• Send mail from administration to faculty/staff through campus mail rather than U.S. mail.
• Employ adjunct faculty instead of tenure-track professors until the economy regains strength.
• Develop office space planning to reduce relocation expenses.
• Stagger lunches and breaks to increase office availability.

Athletics

• Reinstate the men and women’s tennis team.

Computer and Telecommuting

• Implement electronic signature and document management programs on campus.
• Eliminate Fridays off in the summer in favor of telecommuting.
• Utilize online sources for tests and develop and implement an online portfolio for coursework.
• Focus on online education.

Energy Efficiency

• Conserve electricity with timed lights and a “lights out” energy conservation policy.
• Move to a 10-hour workday and close the University on Fridays to conserve energy.
• Power down all computers at the end of the workday.
• Remove space heaters from offices.
• Repair leaking faucets and utilize lower water usage in commode tanks.
• Discourage massive copy orders.
• Stabilize heating and cooling in all buildings.
• Replace the windows in the O'Neal-Sells building with more efficient ones and use weather stripping to seal up drafts in the building.
• Switch to compact fluorescent bulbs.
• Use energy saving modes on printers.

Printing

• Go paperless.
• Recycle toner cartridges.
• Reduce or eliminate the use of paper flyers for campus communication.