PRIVATIZATION BY STEPS. That's one possible interpretation of the direction Northern Illinois University might be taking.

Our problem is that, although the State of Illinois provides a smaller share of the resources, the legislature and the state board of higher education can object to any degree program or center or anything else that suits them. DePaul or Loyola or Northwestern face no such constraint. Otherwise, much of the speech envisions Large New England Private College With Graduate Degrees.

At UCLA (motto: On! Wisconsin!) the dean of the Anderson School of Management proposes to go cold turkey on state support.

"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.

It's politically difficult to obtain a divorce from the state.

In discussing the plan, Olian repeatedly talked about "self-sufficiency" and never used the work "privatization" (except in answering this reporter's questions about why she does not view the word as an appropriate description for the shift.)

Olian's choice of words may be politically wise. An article in the journal The Public Interest details the quest by the Darden School at U.Va. to trade away state dollars for more flexibility, and notes that the plan was "almost derailed" when the then-chair of the school's foundation board used the word "privatization" in a 1996 talk to discuss the idea. Only after everyone involved agreed that "self-sufficiency" was a better way to describe the plan did it move ahead.

The article -- by David L. Kirp of the University of California at Berkeley and Patrick S. Roberts of Virginia Tech -- is an early look at the impact of the changes at Darden. In many respects, the article says that Darden and its supporters were correct that the freedom from the state allowed the business school to raise far more money than it was receiving from the state -- helping to boost the business school's prestige and the quality of students it attracted.

The article, however, questions whether it is the role of a public university to make such tradeoffs, and the piece notes that many other parts of U.Va. lack the facilities or funds of the business school. By embracing the idea that those parts of the university that can bring in more money should do so, and be rewarded for doing so, Kirp and Roberts write that the university was placing ideals at risk.

It's a little late to be worrying about incentives affecting choices. Research departments that have pursued grants with indirect cost returns have been receiving rewards for bringing in money for a long time (systematically, certainly, since the creation of the National Science Foundation and the National Endowments.)

I leave the analysis of the effect of the so-called income sports on university ideals to the reader as an exercise.