It’s time for SMU’s academic units to start spending money like there’s no tomorrow. Forget the budget – spend, spend, spend, until we’re among the nation’s leading institutions in terms of teaching and research.

This was the thought that came to me after last week’s Faculty Senate meeting, where Athletics Director Steve Orsini took questions for the better part of an hour. Orsini came across as enthusiastic and charismatic. He communicated a clear vision of how to build nationally leading programs in high-profile sports like men’s basketball and football.

If only Orsini’s counterparts on the academic side could do the same.

Undergirding Orsini’s confidence is what seems like an unlimited bank account, an open-ended commitment from this university’s trustees that he can have whatever funding he needs to achieve national excellence. The evidence? For starters, last year’s official athletics deficit is a cool $7.2 million dollars. Sure, Orsini admits that this needs to come down some, but the man is clearly not worried. The deficit increased by a million dollars last May, but Orsini – who unflappably told us that he was trained as an accountant – can’t figure out why. Nor does he seem to want to. He doesn’t even know what his overall budget is. When asked at the Faculty Senate meeting, he shuffled some papers, said something about $20 million, then said that figure might be too high. I don’t think that he was trying to evade the question; he doesn’t know this figure because he doesn’t need to. National distinction is the goal here, and he’s been authorized to spend whatever it takes.

Maybe $7.2 million does not strike some of you as a lot of money, but I can assure you that in the context of SMU’s academic mission, it is a substantial sum. As a thought experiment, I’d like to suggest some of the possibilities of what such a sum could accomplish if it were spent on the academic side of the university.

I’ll start with Dedman College, because it’s the part of SMU that I know best. Assuming that enough office space could be found, $7.2 million could hire an extra 72 faculty members. (Because I have limited mathematical abilities, I’m assuming that salary, benefits, computers, overhead, etc., would come to some $100,000 per faculty member). This would be an increase of more than a third in our faculty, which is currently almost exactly 200.

What would an increase of this magnitude mean? It wouldn’t take our student-faculty ratio down to the level of schools like Vanderbilt or Washington University, with which we’d like to be academically competitive. But it would more than reverse the trend of the last decade, which has seen the ratio of student credit hours to tenure-track faculty in Dedman go up by 20 percent. This increase would easily undo the damage done to the undergraduate curriculum by the creation of Ph.D. programs in history and English without adding faculty members. It would surely allow for the expansion of existing graduate programs, and the creation of new ones. It might allow Dedman to offer a truly international curriculum, one with robust course offerings on Latin America, Africa and Asia. The foreign languages could be staffed adequately to require proficiency in a foreign language as a graduation requirement, a measure in place at all top-ranked universities. This amount of money would go a long way in lifting the sciences, traditionally neglected at SMU, to par with the rest of the university.

Or the $7.2 million could be spent more directly on students. With this kind of cash, the honors program could be made into a major feature of SMU life, with enough robust course offerings taught by demanding instructors to reverse the exodus of our most talented and devoted undergraduates. (Last week’s edition of The Daily Campus ran two fine articles on how the lack of academic rigor at SMU is one of the leading factors prompting students to leave). Some of the money could go to expand the ranks of Hunt and Presidential Scholars, programs that let SMU compete with the best schools in the nation for top-flight students.

The library system could certainly use the $7.2 million. Our university’s leadership has succeeded in its goal of landing the Bush Library, but has happily let our library system fall behind institutions like TCU in terms of the size of holdings and number of journal subscriptions. More specialized collections, like the DeGolyer library, have slipped badly in their national standing, even though they are essential to the kind of graduate programs that the school plans. And Fondren Library is one of the most unprepossessing buildings on campus.

National excellence in these areas, of course, will require money, and in the end much more than $7.2 million. But we are a wealthy university backed by some of the wealthiest people in one of the wealthiest cities in the wealthiest nation on earth. We have committed to being a national leader in basketball and football, with the certainty that we can find the money to make it happen. Why can’t we take the same approach to teaching and research?

So let’s start spending money hand over fist. Next year, maybe SMU’s chief academic officer, Provost Paul Ludden, will come to the Faculty Senate to explain the burgeoning academics deficit. He might not know what the deficit is, or have any plan to eliminate it. He might not even know what the budget for the academic side of the university is. But we would all know that we were part of an institution that would settle for nothing less than national excellence.

Benjamin Johnson is an associate professor of history. He can be reached at [email protected].