By Ishaan Gollamudi
Adapting to the Musk administration’s recent freeze on NIH funding, faculty in the Puget Sound Biology Department have been forced to find alternate ways to fund their research. Fortunately, considering the University’s own history of financial difficulties — and its ongoing broke-ness — faculty on campus are well-versed in operating on a shoestring budget. At this point, it might as well be tradition.
As early as 1889, one year after the founding of the University of Puget Sound, the campus’s financial problems became undeniable. After members of the campus administration blew half the school endowment “renting out a genuine live ostrich for a gala to one-up Lewis & Clark’s ‘Admin Extravaganza,’” it became apparent that Puget Sound simply did not generate enough revenue to fund their own administration’s lifestyle. Annual tuition was subsequently raised from $8 to $12, after then-President Cherington invoked “emergency powers” on the grounds that the campus administration’s inability to afford to “rent out two genuine live ostriches to up the ante from last year’s gala” was a dire and immediate threat to the campus community.
This tuition increase proved to be an effective stopgap measure, so effective that it is still in use today. However, with an eye towards the long-term fiscal health of the University, a panel of administrative experts was contracted at exorbitant rates to work out a more permanent solution. In recently uncovered notes about this from President Thoburn, successor to Cherington, this deal was marked by a scribbled note in the margins: “verily, this contract doth remind me of ye olde adage — only a fool throweth money at a problem, for a wise man throweth money at a consultant to fix the problem.” Wise words indeed.
Per historical record, the consultants’ first recommendation was to slash the science budget. The Biology Department in particular was to be reduced to a single copy of Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” and a juvenile lungfish tentatively named “Lungie” (a “more creative” name was to be determined over the following five years). Fortunately, this plan was never implemented in its entirety: one professor was retained to make sure that the students were “actually reading ‘Origin of Species’ and not sneaking off to sock-hops or socials and getting up to un-civic fornication.”
Today, the Biology Department appears to be under similar threat, albeit now from an external source: a new department of the federal government that was created to streamline the bureaucracy of the federal government. Taxpayer money, as the Musk administration has repeatedly assured the public, will finally be returned to taxpayers — after first being routed to the Department of Government Efficiency so they can figure out which departments are wasting taxpayer money. In the meantime, the Biology Department on campus has been struggling to make ends meet, and have started experimenting with various sources of alternate funding. For instance, students in the BIOL 332 Plant Physiology class have been tasked with growing marijuana in the Thompson Hall greenhouse to complete their lab credit. Following their first harvest, the weed will reportedly be sold as “Harned Hash” in the Logger Store. When asked if this was in violation of the terms of the federal funding that the University of Puget Sound receives, a department representative responded: “What funding? The funding we were going to lose anyway?”
Faculty in the Chemistry Department, fearing similar budget cuts, have started to make similar moves. Specifically, department members with organic chemistry expertise have undertaken new research efforts to synthesize “liquid meth crystals” using more environmentally-friendly reagents. Interestingly, the projected revenue from the sale of these novel compounds will reportedly lead to budget surpluses, and is being considered as a potentially permanent solution by the campus administration.