Thank you, Son of Thunder. This is a pretty obvious problem of universities interacting with governments. I blame physics. Physics needs big machines... 6000 gallon vats of liquid hydrogen, etc. Universities couldn't have paid for it, but the government did, because they got weapons. And, like Goldman Sachs, once you have an operating budget of the department calculated in the hundreds of millions, making $120,000 seems trivial. But what do you need to run a math department? Nothing. Palaeography? Very little (unless you need to conserve manuscripts). But the adminstration of the university looks at who got the biggest grants and assumes those people must be important. A lot of good work can be done cheaply. Note that they did not cut the archaeological expeditions which get government grants. Paradoxically, they're willing to pay for people to crate items out of the ground but never to study these objects or communicate their findings. We're in a bad way. (And I don't begrudge the physicists their machines.)