Well, you could buy a house. And if you didn't insist on living where your neighbours were white, you could maybe even buy more than one house, with half a million.
Or you could hire in a number of industry experts to teach sessions on your courses, augmenting your Non-Recurrent staffing budget. Or even an army of graduate students, as teaching assistants. Or a Chief Technical Officer, right at the top of Payclass 10, for two years.
You could buy 80 new computers for a computer lab, plus a fancy new printer.
You could put it into the salaries budget, so that increases stood a chance of keeping up with inflation.
If you felt really generous, you might choose to spend it on building repairs, so that each drop of rain didn't wipe out yet another piece of expensive electronic equipment in some office or lab.
Or you could hire the Vineyard to induct new HoDs...
No one is suggesting that functioning HoDs are not important. No one is suggesting that mentoring is not important. No one is suggesting that _some_ resources shouldn't be allocated for this.
But in a resource-limited environment, is it really necessary to choose an expensive, off-Campus venue when we have plenty of (free, bookable) on-Campus venues - especially if one times it right and goes for the first day of swot "week" rather than the last day of teaching? Is it really necessary to spend so much on feeding, and feeding, and feeding the captive group when lighter refreshments and a more active programme would have left participants feeling less bloated and comatose at the end?
Is it really necessary, when admin staff are sitting wondering how they'll pay for another printer cartridge for the departmental printer, to replace the last one that just ran out, with still two months left on the calendar.. to hear that the University chooses to allocate so much resourcing that way? When cleaning staff borrow yet another R5 they can never return, to get home, because the money ran out long before the month did? When undergraduate tutorials are being cut back from two to one because of pressure on the non-recurrent staffing budget?
At the same time that other initiatives seek to transform problematic aspects of organisational culture, is it really necessary to bloat management expenditure at the expense of "core business" expenditure?