What’s crazy is universities don’t fund research. That’s a more central issue. They both directly profit from research and want to then own the results of that research, it’s a parasitic relationship with funding agencies.
When a university’s are extracting more money from doing research on net then they invest in research that’s not funding. They do get rather creative with accounting, but that’s irrelevant to this discussion.
EX: A students tuition paid for by a research grant does not count as R&D spending by the University or even R&D.