Earlham College | News from Public Affairs

Alan Bigger, Earlham’s director of facilities and
chief environmental officer, is president of APPA, the national association for higher education facilities managers.

RICHMOND, Ind. — The license plate on Alan Bigger's car reads FRUGAL. He's the author of a column called "The Frugal Housekeeper." The title of his book is Frugalisms.

The dictionary defines frugality as "thriftiness and avoidance of waste," which certainly describes Earlham's new Director of Facilities and Chief Environmental Officer.

"I guess that has stuck with me because I am cheap," says Bigger. "I have always been interested in cost-saving ideas."

"I take great pride in shopping at the Salvation Army or Goodwill and paying $5 for a name-brand article of clothing, knowing that the $5 will go to a cause greater than me," he says, letting his Irish brogue resonate. "We rarely repair anything these days. Reusing an item makes perfect sense. Wear the clothing until it becomes a rag, and then use it as a rag."

It is with this thrifty attitude that Bigger ventured into facilities management. He's been in the field for more than 24 years and began working in higher education in 1987 at the University of Missouri at Columbia as assistant superintendent of building services. In 1991 he became director of building services at the University of Notre Dame where he remained until he came to Earlham in September. He is responsible for the entire facilities operation of the Earlham campus including capital projects, remodeling, maintenance, utilities, landscaping and providing leadership to make Earlham an environmentally responsible institution.

"At Notre Dame I was primarily in charge of custodial operations, so I worked more in the service rather than the mechanical areas," he says. "Here at Earlham I have the opportunity to interface with a piece of everything including construction, which also gives me opportunities to work in design."

Bigger's penny-wise nature has served him well in the facilities field through the years because he has been able to find ways to do more with less. Many of his cost-saving measures — from simple ideas like reusing buffer pads and extending the life of carpets and mop heads with regular cleaning to more advanced concepts of robotics and vapor cleaning — have turned up as articles in Executive Housekeeping Today, and a compilation of those articles has been published recently in a book called Frugalisms: Creative Ideas on Leadership in Facilities and Housekeeping Operations.

The secret to his success, he says, is being able to see, or perhaps making himself look at an entire picture.

"I am not good with the fluff and stuff," he says. "I like to translate the ideal into reality, translate it into something that benefits humankind."

Bigger arrived at Earlham during the final stages of implementing a state-funded recycling grant.

"It is always a challenge to take an ideal and put it into practice, especially when it requires behavior modification," says Bigger, who has a good deal of experience in recycling.

"I was involved in recycling before recycling was cool," he says. "My first recycling program at Missouri was an utter failure."

Under Bigger's watch, however, Notre Dame went from recycling 100,000 pounds a year to more than 13 million pounds. Notre Dame's recycling efforts during the past fiscal years realized a savings of $350,000 in deferred landfill fees and generated $50,000 in revenue.

"When I left Notre Dame, we were recycling 62 percent of the waste, but this didn't happen overnight," he says. He expects to find similar success at Earlham.

"The consensus building and methodology of talking about issues are great strengths here at Earlham," he says. "More people feel like stakeholders, and that will encourage more involvement."

Bigger says he never planned on entering the facilities field until he was already a part of it.

Born and raised in Ireland, he received a scholarship to study at what is now Biola University in Los Angeles.

"I got a scholarship for debating," he says. "The Irish are full of blarney, so what did you expect?"

His studies were interrupted when he was to be drafted so he volunteered to join the Air Force during the Vietnam era and remained in the Air Force for 10 years, during which time he received his bachelor's and master's degrees in communication. The military paid for 95 percent of the cost of his education.

"In the early 1980s I was a teaching assistant working on my Ph.D. at Ohio State and there was a massive funding cut that did away with a lot of the funding for TAs," he says. "I went to Texas and worked in hospital administration, specifically housekeeping and laundry. So I got into this field backwards. It wasn't planned or designed."

Although a career in facilities may not have been planned, Bigger seems especially suited because of his prudent nature.

"My father was frugal," he says. "The Air Force taught me to look for areas to stretch resources, and when you start out with a family and you are young, you learn to economize. There are not a lot of resources and you learn to protect your assets. I treat the College's money in a similar fashion. I want to protect my employer's assets, and I always look out for the greater good."

"It is important and inspiring to remember that the end product of everything that we do is the education of a student, and that has long-term ramifications for the country," he says. "We mustn't lose sight of that."

Contact:
Mark Blackmon, director of media relations
765/983-1256 — E-Mail Mark