Might have something to do with the fact that university donors love to build new buildings instead of just giving the university money to be spent on HR. (And then the university doesn't have a guaranteed funding source for a top professor? Yikes!)

Endowed chairs work a bit better, but those usually don't go towards new recruitment.

Isn't that, in turn, perhaps because oftentimes donors then get to name the building? At least this seems common in the US, but that's just an observation from the outside.

Yep. Large donors also like to only pay for constructing buildings, not maintaining them.

My university did exactly this. (Supposedly) spent anywhere between £5 mil and £50 mil on a new building; £80,000 on their opening ceremony with lots of local celebrities; and then left all the students with 4 year-old hardware for design/video courses.

I really appreciated the sterile white-washed building for creative courses while attempting to use After Effects on a G5 iMac :|