That’s where I think you’re not understanding at all. I’m not arguing about the definition of defunding and whether this fits that definition . I’m arguing about you conflating this with defunding public education, and specifically with the growing political movement lately, especially among the right. This is not defunding public education, it’s simply consolidating the overall funding in public to a smaller group.

The best comparison I can make is to the university of Texas system. The UT system measures its overall endowment at approximately $40 billion. That amount is split up with about half of it being designated for the main Austin campus with a student population of about 50k students. The other half of that endowment is designated for all of the other system schools, with a total student population numbering well into the hundreds of thousands (UT Arlington and UT San Antonio alone have almost 100k). Just because UT Austin has a significantly larger endowment value per student compared to its other campuses, it doesn’t mean that UT Austin is considered any less a public institution than, say, UT El Paso or UT Tyler. Just because they horde all that endowment for their campus, it doesn’t mean that the amount designated for them is considered any less of “public education funding” than the amount designated for UT Dallas. It doesn’t mean that we’re “defunding public education” by giving funding for UT Austin that could have been more equitably distributed to UT Permian Basin. It just means that we’re consolidating it in a way that defies equality among students at each system school campus.

With all this in mind, your argument just doesn’t really make sense to me