If the University of Arizona fails to undergo a major transformation in the coming year, it won’t be for lack of ideas on how to change.

Students and faculty and staff members have come up with 75 proposals to overhaul how the university does business in response to calls from the institution’s top officials for suggestions.

In a September 3 memorandum to the faculty and staff, the university’s president, Robert N. Shelton, declared “the time has come to take bold action that will radically change the way we operate” — to become more efficient and less susceptible to fluctuations in state tax-dollar support — because “we cannot achieve our aspirations with either our current funding or operational models.”

In a memo to the campus issued three days later, Meredith Hay, the university’s executive vice president and provost, said cuts in the university’s state appropriations had created a situation in which “we must rethink how we teach, hire faculty, and allocate resources,” to make fuller use of available funds. She outlined a process by which people on the campus could submit ideas for reorganizing, restructuring, and consolidating departments and units.

The recommendations received as of this week range from ambitious proposals to merge colleges to fairly simple calls to save energy through common-sense measures. The ideas are being reviewed by various university committees, which will work together to develop more refined proposals that will be considered by the provost and Faculty Senate this fall. —Peter Schmidt