The Darden School at the University of Virginia did it. Now, the Anderson School of Management at UCLA wants to do it? Are "ideals" at risk? Imagine the planning going on behind the scenes! Here are:

An Inside Higher Ed story by Scott Jaschik;

A report on the Darden School's change from The Public Interest; and

Hhere's the Anderson school's strategic plan, which may be of interest, although we have been unable to find a draft copy of the specific plan for changing funding methods ... yet.

"The driver here is the decline in state support," said Judy D. Olian, dean of the Anderson School of Management at UCLA. She stressed that she did not view the shift as changing the business school's mission or its connection to the rest of UCLA or the UC system. At this point, she said, state support makes up only about 18 percent of the business school's $96 million annual budget, and she said that percentage overstates the contribution because much of the state support is tuition revenue that must go to the state first now before it is returned to the school. In a new model, that revenue would never leave the business school. In the end, the business school would truly lose less than $6 million a year, Olian said. In the 1970s, she said, about 70 percent of the business school's budget came from the state. "The decline makes it easier to say that the gap is not going to be large and we could overcome it," Olian said. And there's more to it than the dollars. Olian noted that California does not have a state budget for 2010-11 so she doesn't know what her budget will be for the year. It would be much better, she said, to have that information and plan accordingly -- and to raise more money from private sources to offset whatever is lost.