At Chapel Hill, the University of North Carolina's flagship campus, only a quarter of the budget comes from state government.

ECONOMIST: State universities

The original Hyde Park campus has always been the flagship, and its top tier fine dining spot since the Seventies had been the Escoffier Restaurant, for decades the premier reservation in upstate New York.

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The Cleveland Clinic, which includes eight hospitals in Ohio along with its flagship campus, introduced a new communication course incorporating the Four Habits model in fall 2011.

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Indianapolis, a city of 790, 000 with its own large black population, is also Democratic territory, as is Bloomington, home to the University of Indiana's flagship campus.

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To increase the number of minorities in its student body, UT added a second layer to the Top Ten Percent Law at its flagship campus in Austin eight years later.

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Mitt Romney, the slash-and-burn governor of Massachusetts, has raised hackles in academia by proposing to privatise, in large part, three campuses at the University of Massachusetts, to revamp its Amherst flagship campus with money from more out-of-state students and most heretically to do away with the office of the university president (currently occupied by one of his political foes).

ECONOMIST: State universities