The funny thing is that Tim Berners-Lee used the same kind of problem to advocate for publishing the web in public domain. He realized that CERN won't give him more resources to create and maintain browsers for each platform used at CERN (CERN was fully focused planning and approval of LHC), so he decided to release libww library in public domain which allowed others outside CERN to build web browsers themselves. That's how the early browsers like ViolaWWW, MidasWWW, Lynx or Mosaic were created.

State governments continually cut budget support for tertiary education in the name of fiscal responsibility, so unfortunately many no longer have the means to do so.

Cutting budgets for education might even be the right thing to do.

But that doesn't necessarily have much to do with research, or at least it shouldn't.

As we saw with newsrooms, when faced with existential crises, even the most traditional firewalls will get scrapped in the race to find nickels in couch cushions.

I don't see how this line of thinking makes sense. Where do you believe research funds come from?

My comment was more normative than descriptive:

I am saying that research budgets and educations budgets shouldn't be intermingled. (And more generally, that research and education institutions shouldn't be intermingled by default either.)

If they were separate institutions, then cutting funding for one doesn't would not impact the other.