Hate to break it to you, but Universities also employ a LOT of trade workers as well, it's not all academics and students. I think it would be fair to say that cutting a similar amount of funding from the california university system would result in a similar number of janitorial, HVAC, maintenance, landscaping, administrative, _librarian_, technology support, and other job losses.

Sure, cutting something as important as state libraries sucks, but you'd be pretty naive to think that shifting the cuts to any other sector wouldn't result in the same amount of job losses.