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IN THIS AGE of belt-tightening, Harvard University is facing the same stringent budget constraints as most honest American citizens.

Sure, hyperactive Jeremy Knowles can yell about austerity all he wants. Vaguely articulate Neil Rudenstine can mumble murky metaphors about tubs and bottoms to his heart's content. The University can scheme about clever ways to bilk $2 billion out of unsuspecting alumni until the Charles freezes over.

But talk is cheap. Desperate times call for desperate solutions. Harvard needs to drastically rethink its fiscal policies, to reconceptualize solvency in a heartless age of global capitalism. With that in mind, we offer eight ideas for Harvard to raise money.

The University should take note of our methodology. First, none of our ideas will inconvenience students. There will be no $5 OCS Guides to Grants, no $40 charges for late study cards, no $25 charges for new IDs, no cutting back of shuttlebus services. Second, none of our ideas will directly harm education at Harvard. And third, these cash cows aren't one-time bonanzas: Harvard can milk them for decades to come.

1. HARVARD DATING SERVICES: This idea will not only raise Harvard tons of money, it will also help alleviate the terrible problems Harvard students have with our sex lives. Face it, there are millions of people in this country who would kill to marry a Harvard graduate. We may not be good-looking or nice, but our earnings potentials are off the charts.

The Harvard Alumni Office will keep a master list of student and alumni information: age, height, weight, gender, sexual orientation, estimated (or in the case of current students, potential) income. People from all over the country, all over the world will call the office. For a modest fee, they will receive the number of a promising candidate. Harvard affiliates who are married or morally opposed to matchmaking services could, also for a small fee, remove their names from the list.

ESTIMATED ANNUAL INCOME--Forty thousand references at $10 a pop: $400,000.

POTENTIAL DANGER: May magnify our delusions that we actually are sexually desirable apart from our Harvard connections.

2. HARVARD ACADEMY: The Harvard name is worshipped internationally. Oil sheiks, African royalty, Japanese entrepreneurs, Kennedys--everybody wants to send their kid to Harvard. But not everyone's kid can squeeze past the admissions office, even the legacies.

Harvard University has to be somewhat selective. Fine. So create a pre-Harvard Harvard, from nursery school through high school. Put it in the Ed School or the Div School, major money-losers that don't teach much of anything, anyway. Make it outrageously expensive ($50,000 a year is no skin off a billionaire's back.)

And make it a feeder. If you advertise it, they will come.

ESTIMATED ANNUAL INCOME--Fifteen classes, 50 kids in a class, $50,000 a brat: $37.5 million.

STUFF TO THINK ABOUT: Harvard Academy sweatshirts! Harvard Academy mugs! Harvard Academy laundry bags!

3. TOURIST PHOTO-OPS: Every day, tourists stroll through the Yard, cameras clicking, wallets bulging. We see them as an annoyance. We should start seeing them as a potential gold mine.

These clueless out-of-towners, eager for a memento of the Harvard mystique, inevitably take their Kodaks straight to the John Harvard Statue of the Three Lies. But they'd rather snap a more honest, more contemporary symbol of Harvard. They'd pay for it, too.

Harvard can harness this prestige-lust with life-sized cardboard cut-outs of its cultural icons. The endless parade of Yardgoers will gladly shell out 10 bucks for pictures of themselves kissing Rudenstine, draping their arms around John Kenneth Galbraith, rubbing Marty Feldstein's bald pate, giving Alan Dershowitz the finger.

ESTIMATED ANNUAL INCOME--A thousand pictures a day, 365 days a year, $9.50 profit per print: $3.5 million a year.

SOMETHING TO KEEP IN MIND: Could inflate The Dersh's ego, if such a thing is possible.

4. CLUB BIZ-MED: The fast-track Smith Barney/Morgan Stanley/Salomon Brothers crowd needs B-school diplomas because their bosses told them to get B-School diplomas. Especially Harvard B-School diplomas.

But they shouldn't have to go to B-School to get them. And Harvard shouldn't have to waste millions of dollars paying the highest-salaried professors in the country to teach basically useless technobabble.

So here's the deal. We eliminate the pretense and sell Harvard MBAs to the highest bidders, regardless of merit. Investment bankers will shell out big-bucks down payments--plus guaranteed percentages of their future earnings--to reserve two-year vacations at the already well-endowed Shangri-La across the river. Their companies will probably chip in, too--hey, prestige is prestige.

The B-School is already lush, immaculate, palatial. It already has a $5 million gym. Just convert its classrooms into additional accommodations and Harvard is ready to do some real business.

ESTIMATED ANNUAL INCOME--Two "classes," 1500 students per "class," an average of $40,000 per "student": $120 million. Subtract $10 million for upkeep, wet bar and framed diplomas. Add $10 million windfall for axing professor salaries.

WARNING: Nobody tell Ralph Nader.

5. WIDENER NO-TELL MOTEL: Sex in the Widener stacks is the great Harvard achievement. But how many of us ever actually accomplish this noble ambition? We are too scared of being Ad Boarded, too scared of running into other couples, too scared of forgetting birth control and being locked in for the night with little to do.

The solution: from 10 p.m. until 8 a.m., make Widener a hotel. Couples could make reservations months in advance (think how valuable those prized Commencement week slots would be) to occupy a level of Widener for the night.

And here's the kicker... false danger! We'll preserve that omnipresent fear of being discovered: A security guard will still patrol the premises and wander onto every floor. But no one will get caught. The guard will make plenty of noise, giving the customers time to scurry away before she catches them in flagrante delicto.

It's ritualized danger--Harvard students (and wannabes entranced by the stacks legend) can pretend to take the risk without suffering any nasty, resume-ruining consequnces. Complimentary birth control included.

ESTIMATED ANNUAL INCOME--Ten levels, 250 school days, $100 per couple per night: $250,000.

POSSIBLE INCONVENIENCE: May convince Moral Majority to pick Widener as firebomb target.

6. VEGAS-STYLE MEM CHURCH WEDDINGS: As Canady residents, we got a big thrill waking up to the sound of the Memorial Church bells pealing in celebration of a wedding. But these weddings were all too rare.

Memorial Church is rarely used: Sunday services, an occasional High Holy Day, a Commencement service or two and not much else. Why not exploit all the downtime by making it a quickie-wedding haven? Install a few theme chapels. Hire a few more reverends and rabbis and start advertising in Modern Bride.

ESTIMATED ANNUAL INCOME--300 days per year, and 10 weddings each day (an hour is more than adequate), $500 per wedding: $1.5 million.

MORAL REPULSION QUOTIENT: Encouraging marriage in this morally bankrupt world is a good thing. Allowing white stretch limos to park in the Yard is not.

7. PROFESSORIAL SERVICES: Every academic wants to teach at Harvard for the same reason Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn agreed to give a Commencement speech here after turning down the rest of the Ivy League: "Because it's Harvard."

That means Harvard has total leverage over its professors. Basically, we own them.

Lots of Harvard professors make a lot of money on the side selling their talents to corporations, governments, private clients. They write popular books. They rake in the honoraria.

Bully for them, but Harvard should get a piece of the action. Twenty percent. Hell, make it 30. If The Dersh wants to represent murderous European socialites, the school that made him a star should at least be able to snag a new gym for his efforts.

While we're at it, we might as well make our well-paid servants lend a hand to anyone willing to shell out the big dough. Force Marty Feldstein to help millionaires with their taxes. Force Seamus Heaney to edit pulp best-sellers. Force Jeff "I'm too busy saving the world to talk to undergraduates" Sachs to clean up a country that has some money, dammit. Force Med School profs to perform celebrity plastic surgery.

ESTIMATED ANNUAL INCOME--Tens of millions if we play our cards right, baby.

BUT ISN'T THAT INTELLECTUAL PROSTITUTION?: Yes.

8. MARKETING BIOLOGICAL, CHEMICAL AND NUCLEAR WEAPONS TO THIRD WORLD NATIONS AND RURAL INSURGENCIES: This is an incredibly lucrative business, and Harvard has hundreds of chemistry and biology professors who work in impractical fields like comparative anatomy or theoretical chemistry who might do far better work manufacturing third-generation neurotoxins. Remember, we own them.

ESTIMATED ANNUAL INCOME--$300-500 million, depending on the state of the Libyan economy.

SLIGHT ETHICAL DIFFICULTIES: A bit of a thumbs-down for sponsoring proliferation, destablizing the post-Cold War world, purveying weapons of death and possibly bringing about Armageddon.

But hey, bucks are bucks. Death is a growth industry. And Harvard--with only a paltry $6 million endowment to its name--could really use the dough.

Michael R. Grunwald '92 and David A. Plotz '92 plan to join consulting firms if they graduate.

Harvard has a lot of money, but in these financially troubled times, it needs lots more.

No problem.