With the recent news about the University’s budget surplus, students all over campus are thinking about how we could put that money back into the University in order to best serve students and set the college in good financial shape for next year. You saw a few of our ideas in last week’s Doubletruck (https://yaledailynews.com/weekend/2014/11/07/what-would-you-do-with-51-million/) but alas, none of them passed President Salovey’s desk. But WKND’s mother always said: if at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again. Without further ado, here are the next best six ideas:
1: A Second Harkness Tower Made Entirely out of Legos
The going price for 100 2×4 Lego bricks is about $20. That means we can buy 255 million bricks. The tower is 266 feet tall and about 40 feet wide. That’s 7,112 bricks high and 383 bricks wide in length, 766 bricks wide in width. If it’s a pure column (we know what we’re talking about), that’d take over 2 billion bricks, which is over “budget,” so let’s say that we can eliminate three-fourths of the bricks by making it hollow and tapering it at the top, while still having enough to be structurally sound. And saving room for another set of absurdly loud bells.
2: Wenzels for Everyone!
Let’s say every Yale University student wants one Wenzel delivered each day at 1:00 a.m. until we run out of money. For each of our 12,223 undergrad and postgrad students, that’s 568 days straight of salty, spicy goodness.
3: The Longest, Lil Wayne-est, Expensivest Spring Fling Ever
Lil Wayne charges about $300k for, let’s say, a three-hour show. That’s $100k per hour. That means that, pending labor laws, we can hire him to perform 16-hour days from 8:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. at $1.6 million a day. We can do this for a solid month for $49.6 million. The other $1.4 million can be used for setting up the stage ($20k) and footing the bill for his cocaine habit ($1.38 million).
4: Beat Harvard at the Other Game
No matter how The Game turns out, we’ll still have a trick up our sleeve. Come February 1, our friends in Cambridge may change the channel when we buy six minutes and 22 seconds of ad time during the Super Bowl to promote the Yale Dramat’s new, avant-garde production on the depravity, the decline and the fall of Harvard.
5: A Whole Lot of Excellent Sheep
Farmer’s Weekly estimates the price of a heavy sheep at $156.36. That means we can buy 326,170 sheep, or roughly three sheep per New Haven resident. Deresiewicz would be proud.
6: Fiscally Responsible Reinvestment and Improvements
Booooooring.