I've heard that said. But my university tuition had an explicit 10% charge to subsidize upgrades for the football program, so ...

It's very easy to lie in budgets by only counting a subset of expenses.

Money is fungible.

Only if the organization with the money wants to do that. Flip it around. Do you think the sports program at any major university pays for physics research facilities (or any topic outside of sports medicine)?

>Only if the organization with the money wants to do that.

Great, this should be a enough of an argument then for the federal government to decide how grant money is used.

It does. That's what the negotiation on overhead rates is for.

A lot of this discussion is people who don’t understand the system reinventing it from first principles as they slowly come to terms with the nuance.

Not when double entry accounting is involved.

And?

The one thing has nothing to do with the other.

Football funds itself. That's why the coach makes so much money. If research funded itself, researchers would make a lot of money.