Australian National University staff and students are willing to pay more for parking, cut complimentary coffee and tea and think the Chancelry should go without potted plants to help save $51 million.
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Nearly 700 staff and students have attended forums to discuss ways to cut spending, with the ANU forecast to lose $23 million next year and $28 million in 2015 - between the budget cuts revealed in October's midyear economic forecast and the efficiency dividend in the federal budget.
Executive director of administration and planning Chris Grange said that with nine forums to go, he expected 1000 member of the ANU community to give their views on the financial situation which would be reviewed, costed and then decided by next month.
Mr Grange said there had been a wide range of suggestions, some more practical than others.
One of the most common suggestions was to increase student numbers, a strategy employed by some of the larger metropolitan institutions across the country.
Mr Grange said while all ideas were on the table, ''it would be harder for the ANU to enrol larger numbers because the market is tighter in the ACT''. ''A lot of staff ask questions about why we need to have a surplus, whether we will get more capital grants in future, and whether our investment portfolio returns might improve after September.''
But Mr Grange said he expected the university to have $20 million to $40 million less next year and it was ''a case of not even aiming for anything as ambitious as a surplus but just getting over the line''.
Staff and students preferred sharing the pain of cuts through increased parking fees and reducing office amenities such as tea and coffee than to have job losses.
Students were keen to see all potted plants removed from the Chancelry - a luxury they said had cost $300,000 according to a freedom of information request - although Mr Grange said he was sceptical of this figure.
There had been some suggestion by overseas academics of furloughs - or agreements by staff to take unpaid days or weeks off.
There were also calls for cut-backs to administrative duplication and a reduction in executive travel.
National Tertiary Education Union ACT division president Deborah Veness said the temporary hiring freeze on non-academic staff had caused enormous concern on campus and management had yet to inform staff or the union how it would manage workloads.
The union had gained a number of new members.
''We have had to deal with increased contact from a number of stressed and unhappy staff concerned about their futures and their workloads,'' Ms Veness said.
She said some suggestions in the forums had been written down, while others had not.
''I hope it's not just a case where they are writing down the things they want to hear,'' she said.
