In that sort of environment, your actual contribution to some objective goal has nothing at all to do with your position in the bureaucratic pecking order. That's why the basketball coach makes $2M/year, while the galley slaves teaching the classes make $20k, plus shitty health insurance.
Using less money, less staff, less equipment does not make you an alpha academic. In the 90's, that meant that an assistant professor in math or science had to have Sun workstation with a 21" monitor (~$12-15k). A full professor got a fancy SGI Octane that cost even more. At my college, the full math professors were mostly in their sixties -- my calculus professor used his SGI as a terminal emulator to futz around on the VAX. The screen savers were cool though.
That's exactly, word-for-word, what professors have told me here. Sad indeed.
"In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake." By way of corollary, it adds: "That is why academic politics are so bitter."
Universities make money on grants, what is called the "overhead" -- it ranges from 40% to even more of all grant money received. In such an environment, it makes sense to charge as much as possible for the research. That's is exactly what most class A universities do.
And that is why the true stars of any university are the departments that charge more for their research. E.g., if you have professors that can justify building a hugely expensive particle physics' lab, that is a big point for you.