That paperless academic environment we’ve been promised for the past few decades never quite seems to arrive. Each year, academic leaders find themselves inundated with more and more forms. Although many of these can now be completed online, a surprising amount of paperwork that has to be completed by hand still crosses our desks. Every week seems to bring a new form, many of them seemingly created by people without much design skill who haven’t given a great deal of thought to the person who’s going to be completing the document. With that in mind, therefore, I thought it would be worthwhile to articulate a few general principles of etiquette that we might adopt whenever we’re adding to the stack of forms we expect those at our institutions to complete.
Since 2013, economists and financial strategists have insisted that higher education must reduce its costs. In fact, the Moody’s perception of mounting fiscal pressure on all key university revenue sources led to the 2013 downgrade of the credit rating for the entire sector (Moody’s, 2013). But even before the 2008-09 economic crash, the Berea College administration realized that its budget was not fully sustainable in the long term. In 2008, almost 80 percent of Berea’s budget came from its endowment, which by March 2009 dropped from more than $1 billion to less than $700 million.
