Read the following passage and answer the item that follows. Your answer to this item should be based on the passage only.

Universities exist partly to fund inquiry whose payoff cannot be predicted in advance, and history is full of research that looked frivolous at the time and later underpinned a genuinely useful application. This does not mean every research output is equally significant; most academic papers are read by only a handful of specialists and cited even less. But an institution that funded only research with an obvious, immediate application would also quietly stop funding the small, unglamorous discoveries that occasionally turn out, years later, to matter enormously. The uncomfortable truth is that no one can tell in advance which unglamorous paper that will be.

According to the author, what would happen if an institution funded only research with an obvious, immediate application?