Inefficiency in Hard Times

Here's a link some of you might want to visit:
http://richde.wordpress.com/2011/05/18/if-you-have-to-ask-ten-sure-fire-ways-to-lose-money-on-research/
I was having dinner not long ago with one of my New Center for Psychoanalysis classmates, his wife (who teaches Spanish at a Cal State) and their good friend (who is a lab administrator at UCLA).  I remarked in the course of some conversation about academic finances that had never been any solid evidence behind the claim that scientific research was profitmaking for universities (as opposed to their corporate "partners").  Cross-subsidies and recharge practices have always been too opaque were to justify that claim.  Those who study university budgeteering know that scientific research costs universities a lot of money, and that granting insitutions are supposed to reimburse those costs on the basis of "recharge" applications.  It's common, however, that the recharge monies actually covered by the University fall below the target.   Oh, no, they said.  Every flick of a light switch is accounted for in those grant applications.  Yes, yes, I said.  The grant application is just the beginning of the process.  What you say is "common knowledge," but it's really just a convenient supposition.  They had a hard time opening their minds on the subject.  Let's say, in the USA, it's a doxa, not just a supposition.
CA is going through its usual budget throes and UC continues to conduct its hideous experiments on "in/efficiency." These utterly non-innovative experiments mostly consist of firing staff who either interface directly with faculty and students, or care for the infrastructure.  Student Affairs loyalists also complain that their budgets are always the first to go, and I sympathize with that point of view, insofar as we are talking about counseling and health services, and funds to help students participate in school culture, e.g. by bringing important speakers of their choice to campus--a "right" to which Yudof and the right-wing "pro-Israel"anti-multicultural academic lobby are opposed.  (I believe there must be an Israel, btw.)  But I have to admit that I think a lot of student services are not as important as the opportunity to study Korean should you happen to live on the Pacific Rim.  Also, I could do without Grad Division.  I really think the faculty and graduate students are the people who know which graduate research most deserves funding, not persons in the field of "educational management." 
Is there any good news?  Any hobbits about?  Messianic saviors of mindfulness?  At first I was excited about Jerry Brown's budget veto, because I foolishly hoped his motives included disapproval of the enormous cuts to UC required by the proposal.  Those better-informed than I report otherwise.  My friend Bob Samuels ("Changing Universities") finds everything budgetary still thoroughly lamentable.  Probably--a long history thereof would suggest--the levels required by the proposed cuts will be taken next time as the new normal and justify even worse pillagings.  Tra la.  My latest mad hope is that Brown is not so much endorsing Republican propaganda about taxes and big government as he is refusing to adopt the Republican/Obama strategy of papering over the country's impecuniousness by going into more debt so you can just cut the programs you don't like, but don't have to bust any trusts or cut back on robot weaponry programs (the Armed Services are, like the Academy, still somewhat labor-intensive).  I think Brown means to imply this when he talks about "adult" budgets.  The difficulty is that all human beings live in fantasy worlds that make better or worse use of more or less, these or those, kinds of realities.  Our experience as world-simulators should have taught us by now that taking away our allowance is not always an effective counter-strategy.  Granted, that kind of thing can cut deeply into treasured beliefs as well as "practical" services.  Lots of folk console themselves by taking the position that disability payments just can't be cut any further or student fees raised higher. And we're easy to manipulate because we're always prone to believe that "other people" are getting away with murder--me included. Maybe if the county refuses to partner(contribute lots of money to) infrastructure projects benefiting private or non-profit users, someone would eventually "get" it.  More likely, however, those private and non-profit users will attack the county for its anti-capitalism (as opposed to its refusal to use taxpayer money for private interests--our current form of taxation without representation).  Sigh.  We can't be made acquainted with reality simply by taking our pocket money away.