I think we have to- if there is a donation increase we may be able to squeeze out of our over-squeezed, it is the extra costs of leveraging the future (borrowing) to stay above the cull line, until some form of sanity hits.
There will be market corrections. Bama does not want Arkansas to be able to spend their way to parity.
And we must think outside the box. The AD and the University. And get political to make the BOR allow it.
We need to be a leader in getting outside developers to pick up the cash issues we have. So many more people have a benefit in ISU being a high major school than JP. Yet only his cash right now. Think Pollard and Light but in the SEZ, and now NEZ (I also dreamed about redoing the press box with a multipurpose but admittedly that has faded in the last 15 years as we face death). No more valuable RE than Hilton, so do a public-private deal there too.
Maybe even programs themselves. In essence, you're asking for investors rather than donors. We spend to our means. If we lock in cost coverage assurances- say at an index of the average P5 MBB budget plus the department fixed costs we extract from MBB revenue- we can give upside. If you're a group of donors-turned-investors- at least now you have a chance to make money, and the risk of giving a lot less. It is not an option (they know the indexed cost).
The absolute frustrating thing is that others built their wealth often by having more state money, and getting things like multipurpose. Now, if JP were to propose the AD and University share the costs, the AD getting a favorable back-loaded lease of a multiple purpose NEZ that added revenue to the AD, people would lose their minds. Instead the AD will struggle, ISU's brand will fade, meanwhile the University has to find ground to build separate million dollar facilities.
I am not anti-JP, but he is too conventional. So I love the PnL approach he is doing. We need that across the entire AD.
