Tonight’s Missouri Lottery PowerBall jackpot is $115 million. With cuts to higher education appropriations looming, perhaps buying lottery tickets is now our best hope of getting more money from the state.
I’ve never been much of a lottery player, though as I understand the rules you have to actually play to win. Strangely, twice in the past two weeks I have found a losing lottery ticket tucked under the windshield wiper of my Ford in Lot 24. I’ve tried not to read too much meaning into that gesture by an unknown passerby.
Purely as a spectator, though, I have always been drawn to those jackpot winners who, at least for the cameras anyway, vow to return to their jobs and not let the money turn their lives upside down. People have studied what happens to lottery winners so I am sure there is empirical evidence to support or deny my theory, but I would predict that the happiest lottery winners, long term, are those whose priorities do not change much just because they suddenly have a pile of cash. You will hear such people say things like, the first things they will do is pay off their mortgage or secure a college fund for their kids. Sure, they’ll probably take a four-week trip to Aruba and buy a new flat screen TV, but the first things on their list are the same things that were on the top of their list when they were just cashing their regular monthly paycheck.
I once heard a consultant who works with nonprofit organizations say that sometimes the worst thing that can happen to an organization is for it to suddenly come into a lot of money. A windfall can be a dangerous thing if the organization doesn’t already have its priorities established and a plan in place for what it would do with money if it came.
It is unlikely that the university is going to win the lottery or otherwise come into a lot of money; instead, we all are contemplating what budget cuts might mean to the institution and our respective corners of it. But just like a family’s priorities should stand apart from what it can afford, the university needs to address what its core priorities are before we start making decisions based solely on what we think we can pay for.
Take that hypothetical lottery-winning family that I admire, for example. With a regular middle-class income Mom and Dad had determined since before the kids were born that a college education was important. Maybe they had the resources to start a college fund; maybe they were only able to insure that their kids went to an A+ program high school and did everything required to qualify for a two-year community college scholarship. They set the priority, and then they matched their resources to that priority as best they could. Then the big payday comes and suddenly they can pay in advance for full tuition at Harvard. With only their middle-class income, maybe an Ivy League education was never something they could even try to budget for: the amount they are able to budget for college has now changed, but the place college held on their list of spending priorities did not.
When the university confronts our significant appropriations cuts, we need to have a keen sense of who we are and what sort of university we want to be. That same sense of purpose and identity should drive difficult decisions about reductions just as it should drive more pleasant choices about where to allocate new resources when times improve.
Soon President Nietzel will be initiating a renewed long range planning process that necessarily will take budget realities into account. All of us should be pushing for – and, with our participation, making – a process that requires us to answer these core questions about the identity and priorities of the university. Until we have those kinds of answers, responses to budget cuts are likely to be haphazard and driven by self-preservation instincts at lower levels.
The questions we need to ask in the face of less money are the same questions we need to ask in the face of more money, and if we don’t have answers to those questions the money doesn’t matter all that much.
