SharePoint Templates for Academic Departments

One of my Top 10 eLearning Predictions for 2010 was “Lots of SharePoint”.  I received the following inquiry in between the time I finished writing my predictions and when it went live:

I found your post, SharePoint Examples, regarding finding others using SP in training organizations.  I have recently been charged to lead a team to assist with the design, look, feel and governance of our existing SP deployment.  I work at a University and one of our first task’s is to work on a template that might meet 80% of an Academic Departments needs.  Things like a policy and procedures, meeting agenda, budget, etc. I’m wondering in your search if you’ve come across others who  may have created a more customized template that better suits the needs of a department vs the out of the box templates that you might be able to share.

This is an example of a kind of request that is going to happen quite a bit.  I actually don’t know where to find templates that might go behind the kinds of use cases that I discuss in Using SharePoint or that is described above.  In fact, I don’t believe these are even called templates, so …

What would you call what this person is looking for?

How would this person find SharePoint templates that they could use / modify for their purposes?

Please help.