I'm not sure if you can research it, but as an employee, we were having meetings about "what if" scenarios having to do with a budget crisis before the so-called budget crisis even happened. What we were told were that UC budget forcasters projected that in a few years that their would be a need for massive cutbacks and fee increases. What is interesting about this is that we were in meetings BEFORE the Bush 2000 election and before the recession. So my question is how much of this crisis is real and how much of it is an excuse by UC executives and managers to get rid of programs they don't want, get rid of positions they don't want, and to guide the University into deeper cooperative agreements with the military and corporate institutions. Just look at see who has suffered these last 7 years of cutbacks. Lower level staff, the arts and humanities, ethnic studies. Look who is doing famously--engineering, biogenetics, chemical farming research (UC Davis) etc.