This will seem rather tame to anyone who has lived through even a medium-grade corporate revamping. “We haven’t been good at cutting when we add,” said Robert Massa, Lafayette’s new vice president for communications, speaking of colleges in general. “We just add.”

Rising tuition and income from endowments have made this possible. But the unique structure of universities has also made it inconvenient to do otherwise. “In some ways, higher education is more like a political environment than the management of a private corporation,” Mr. Weiss said. Except that thanks to tenure, it is difficult to vote anyone out of office. Still, he added, “Alienating some of your faculty members, if you can avoid it, is something you shouldn’t be doing.”

This is just one of the reasons why it is so hard to make big cuts to a college’s budget and reduce tuition in turn. Here are some others:

CUTTING DEPARTMENTS The political challenges with faculty make something as seemingly simple and obvious as cutting expensive and undersubscribed academic departments pretty hard. In fact, Mr. Weiss could not remember the last time Lafayette had done such a thing.

But such cuts are practically inevitable for programs that have fewer students. “Fine arts has studio-based production, so capital and facility costs are high,” said Jane Wellman, executive director of the nonprofit group Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity and Accountability, speaking of colleges in general. “Piano tutoring is pretty much one to one in a room with a piano. Pianos are expensive. Agriculture is expensive because of the lab costs, which means a barn.”

An English student, however, is generally a profit center. “They’re paying for the chemistry major and the music major and faculty research,” she said. “They don’t want to talk about it in institutions, because the English department gets mad. The little ugly facts about cross-subsidies are inflammatory, so they get papered over.”

About all Mr. Weiss will say about this is that he agrees that Lafayette needs to do a better job of discriminating between the things it can and cannot do well. He is too good on the politics to single out any department. But there is little doubt that he and administrators like him will need to give up on some foreign languages, minor sciences or parts of the arts pretty soon.

FACULTY PRODUCTIVITY Professors at Lafayette teach five classes a year over two semesters and work with students on their independent research projects. At some colleges and universities, the number of classes is lower and at others it is higher. Couldn’t Lafayette lower costs by demanding that the faculty perform less research and teach one additional class?