For the past thirty years, conventional wisdom has held that cutting public funding will make public institutions more efficient. This idea has profoundly altered support for higher education. University leaders have regularly assured legislators, and the general public, that business-oriented science, fundraising, and sophisticated financing could make up for per-student declines in the public funding of the educational core. In this article, the author discusses what Californians learned in the last year, 2009: that higher education leaders are still unable to demonstrate the necessity of rebuilding public funding. California, one of the world's wealthiest places, has seen one of the world's most astonishing declines in college achievement. The state has cut its investment in higher education by close to 50 percent since 1980, forcing tuition increases like the 60 percent rise at the University of California from 2004 to 2008 and an anticipated 32 percent rise between 2009 and 2011. If there's a silver lining to the California budget cuts of 2009, it's that many of the state's citizens are finally demanding a restoration of strong public funding. Strong public funding built the unparalleled U.S. university system. It will be essential to the system's continued quality.