Is there any week that doesn’t pass without bad news for universities? Take just US higher education as an example. The 10-campus University of California system, facing a $800 million slash from its $3.2 billion budget, is beginning to circulate emails about how such cuts might be implemented.

Jonathan Eisen this week blogged about emails reportedly circulating at UC Santa Cruz in which biomedical faculty are protesting a proposed 4-8% salary cut for all staff. They have a seemingly valid point in that their salaries come out of federal grant money, not from the UC system; they argue that it makes little sense to cut their salaries when it won’t help the state.

UC San Diego has also halted all recruiting efforts. “We cannot afford to bring in new professors and staff at the expense of the outstanding faculty, staff, and students already here,” says a 9 June memo from Paul Drake, senior vice-chancellor of academic affairs. And at UC Berkeley, a 15 June memo from chancellor Robert Birgeneau says that campus cuts will average 20% for the coming fiscal year.

A news story in this week’s Nature takes a look at one way public university campuses are trying to cope: using Florida as a case study, it show how individual department heads are scrambling to pull out all the stops in a plea for funding; applying desperately for what they hope will be a flow of cash from the economic stimulus package; and battening down the hatches in case all efforts fail.

With so many universities applying for stimulus grants, though, success rates are expected to be much lower than normal. And those funds don’t help core operations at universities anyway. The underlying problems remain massive cut-backs in university investments from state legislatures, and plunging endowments at private research universities. (Even Harvard, the richest university in the world, cut 275 staff jobs this week because of its endowment troubles.)