Tamar Lewin today reports in this morning’s New York Times that colleges and universities are making small spending cuts that add up to big savings for the institutions: “While colleges and universities slashed their spending this year with wrenching layoffs, hiring freezes and halts in construction projects, they whittled away at costs with smaller, quirkier economies, too.” She cites decisions to do away with telephone landlines, holding “virtual” athletic contests, cutbacks on window washing and trash collection, as well as to rebuild computers instead of buying new ones. Everyone who works in higher education has experienced such budgetary trims.

But I wonder whether these cuts are not mostly cosmetic? My university has just publicized another public meeting (“a town hall meeting”) on our budget. The announcement says that staff and faculty will hear about “cost-savings initiatives,” a new early retirement program and “how current economic conditions are affecting the university’s budget.” If we cannot attend, we have been asked to “share [our] cost-savings ideas” by sending an e-mail to a university new “savings” e-mail address. If this sounds like what Procter and Gamble used to do in tough economic times, well . . . it is. But if we are really aiming for a “new normal,” living with dirty windows is not going to be enough.

This is made quite clear in Tracy Jan’s story in The Boston Globe a couple of days ago. Jan reports that “It’s not just the hot breakfasts and shuttle bus service that have been targeted by Harvard University administrators in the age of the shrinking endowment. Once untouchable classrooms and laboratories are about to be hit — cuts that some on campus worry will diminish Harvard’s academic ambitions.” Jan describes this as “the new reality,” and reports that the severity of the Harvard budgetary crisis (especially in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences) may produce declines in faculty size, increases in undergraduate class size, reduction in the number of course offerings — and possibly declines in faculty attention to and demands of undergraduate education. Jan quotes “a longtime professor” as saying that “one of the ways to teach the same number of students with less staff is to demand less of them.” Such changes will affect the educational mission of a great university in ways that eliminating landlines will not.

The recession has hit all institutions. The University of California is about to cut faculty compensation by 8 percent. All institutions are scrambling to reduce costs in order to conform to the new reality. But my own take on the situation is that short-term cost reduction and one-time savings will not succeed in producing the New Normal. I believe that what we need is for each institution to reconsider its mission in order to determine what fundamental organizational changes can be made in order to produce permanent savings while retaining the quality of education. We have been doing too much because a glut of revenue led us to believe that we did not have to make hard choices. But those days are gone forever — or for a very long time. Are we up to the new challenge? (Brainstorm illustration incorporating photos by Flickr users Abulic Monkey and dawnzy58)