Valerie Strauss’s blog today features a post by David Shreve that connects the firing of UVA President, Teresa Sullivan, and the flawed thinking that led to it, with currently popular ideas about the governance of universities, regressive tax policies in the states, and the right wing attack on American public life.

Professor Shreve dismisses Rector Helen Dragas’s message, to which I have referred in my last post:

Dragas’s defense and the “new model” it recommends in place of the old, is based upon a serious misconception, derived from faulty economic theory, an almost complete ignorance or misreading of economic history, and a shallow appraisal of the “virtues” allegedly carried by the “new model.”

I expect Professor Shreve refers to the document’s naive valuation of online instruction in part of this, but his most important point is likely this one:

The simplest and most critical misconception of all is the notion that state tax systems, including Virginia’s, cannot be expected to yield much more revenue than they presently generate without also imposing great costs upon the state’s economic vitality.

Professor Shreve’s answer to Helen Dragas and others who would have the university “sell itself into risky “pay-to-play” schemes, into a tacit endorsement of ‘benefactors’ whose fundamental practices benefit few or none, or into a deep financial dependence upon the kind of wealth that depends itself upon an ultimately self-defeating model that treats up as down, inequality as efficiency, and value extraction as value-added” is a return to sensible state funding models for higher education and to the sensible, progressive tax policies that formerly underwrote such models.

It is quite simply a boost in state general fund appropriations generated by economy-enhancing tax reform, a boost that would simultaneously enhance funding adequacy and stability . . .

—It’s refreshing to read such a spirited defense of the public sphere.