Whether we like it or not, budget cuts are coming, and your college could be in jeopardy.
 
Based on recent projections from the state’s Board of Regents, about $74 million from this year’s budget will not be available next year.
 
Something must go.
 
What exactly should be cut? More than $48 million could come straight from the academic core, which comprises the bulk of
University spending.
 
How can we possibly decide what to axe? No one wants their department to take hits, so it’s hard to see the forest through the finger pointing.
 
Some say statistics can shine light on the situation. Departments turning over the most revenue, graduating the most students or operating most efficiently should stay while the rest should go.
 
However, as the saying goes, statistics are like bikinis: What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.
 
The solution, then, is to use good old-fashioned common sense to work our way through the distress.
 
Think of it like scheduling. Each semester, we all get out the degree audits and start signing up for classes. This column is just like that, but in reverse.
 
Call it de-scheduling, if you will, and your degree audit is logic you’ve attained in spite of the University’s attempts to compress your mind into ideological boxes.
 
Let’s trim some fat, shall we?
 
You’re up first, College of Agriculture. USA Today reported in 2009 that 60 percent of adults can’t digest milk. My solution: cut the Dairy Sciences program by 60 percent — or throw it out entirely with the curds and whey.
 
Also in the Ag College is the School of Human Resource Education and Workforce Development, or “SHREWD.” Cut this without hesitation for its annoying acronym and, if nothing else, because the world really doesn’t need more Toby Flendersons.
 
Now to the College of Education, which loses points automatically for its redundantly redundant name. It houses the Kinesiology Department, which offers some of the most intellectually stimulating courses on campus — tennis, archery, ballroom dancing and jogging, among others.
 
I’ll mix it up and vote to keep these. Clearly, we are preparing our students well for a post-work retirement sustained on the guarantees of Social Security. Leave it untouched, and sign me up for beginning rugby next spring.
 
There’s fat to be trimmed within the College of Science, though. Forget the $18.8 million in grants won in 2009-10 through biomedical and health research. So what if the University is home to one of only 19 medical-health physics programs in the nation?
 
Chlorophyll? More like bore-ophyll. Freshman biology is a joke anyway. I hear if you fail, you can get the teacher removed and start over (right, Dominique Homberger?)
 
On a personal note, I must address mass communication, the Great Manship, which hath carried me o’er the sea of schooling to the brink of graduation and passage into the real world.
 
I want to defend you, but hell, anything Katie Couric or Sean Hannity can do, any drunken toddler could, too. Cut it, and cash in the savings.
 
Finally, let’s look to humanities, where undeclared juniors get their placebo degrees to buy time before graduate school.
 
Women’s and gender studies? Unless you’re studying a way to cook my dinner, clean my dishes and do my laundry faster, it’s time to plug this bleeding program.
 
Religious studies and philosophy — I’ll default to Friedrich Nietzsche: God is dead.
 
Unless He can, like, resurrect or something, you might as well nail your degree program to a tree and place it in a tomb, preferably guarded by Roman soldiers.
 
Speaking of death, Latin has been extinct for hundreds of years but somehow manages to kill thousands of GPAs every semester. Let’s send Latin to the mystical beyond with Eurydice and bid the department a kind valete.
 
While we’re on foreign languages, say sianara to Japanese, arrivederci to Italian and a respectful kwaheri to Swahili, that most universal of all languages.
 
In fact, let’s just throw out languages altogether. We know English good enough by the time we get into college, so there ain’t no need for fancy linguistics. And as far as literature goes, University students obviously know enough about interpreting critical texts making use of rhetorical strategies like irony and sarcasm.
 
They don’t need a professor — or a columnist — to point it out for them.
 
Ultimately, when it comes to budget cuts, there are no sacred cows. All departments are on the chopping block.
 
If anyone tells you otherwise, take your wallet, and your degree audit, and run like hell — see, I told you that jogging class would come in handy.
 
Cody Worsham is a 21-year-old mass communication senior from Baton Rouge. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_cworsham.
 
 
 
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Contact Cody Worsham at [email protected]