University of Virginia seeks greater freedom in return for fewer tax dollars

The significance of Bayh-Dole dollars to universities can be seen in a view of the broader landscape. The University of Virginia now gets less than a tenth of its funding from the state, and wants to cut that even more. The issue is somewhat related to fee diversion at the US Patent Office in seeking an answer as to "what to do" when the money coming in doesn't cover the costs [for the University of Virginia, the money doesn't arrive from the state in the first place; for the USPTO, under fee diversion, it was taken taken away]

-->from Robert Becker, Chicago Tribune online:

[I]n an era of plummeting state support--the University of Virginia, for example, now gets less than a tenth of its funding from the state--public schools across the nation have been forced to act more like private schools, raising private funds to support everything from financial aid to faculty salaries to research.

(...)
While Virginia's law and business schools have moved to what the university has termed "self-sufficiency," accepting only nominal state support while securing the freedom to set tuition and salaries, university leaders say their schools would not become private.

(...)

But the 1990s brought a change in state political culture, education officials say. A succession of governors and legislators took aim at the university, with one governor telling faculty members that they should stop conducting research [?] and spend more time in the classroom
<--

And, of Boalt Law School:

And only recently the dean of the University of California at Berkeley Law School said publicly that he would like to partially privatize the school to offset state cuts.