I'm not sure about that. If you pump out a tonne of great research, but use relatively less money, wouldn't that make you look better? Or is the academic world that far removed from the rest of the economy?
Remember that higher education is a bureaucracy, and since the types of conflict that spring up are really minor, they are particularly petty, nasty and status-centered.
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.
It's really sad that this is the case, but in the lab I worked for at a UC many of our costs were complete BS made up so that we could use up the full amount of our grant. The system encourages this behavior. The logic is completely flawed: If you don't use the money, then you obviously don't need it. Next time you won't receive the full amount from your grant. When your grant is millions of dollars over a few years, you end up having a lot of very nice dinners paid for with money that was meant to be used for research and education.
The Halo Effect is a well-known bias. Important things cost a lot of money, therefore if what you're doing doesn't cost a lot of money, it's not important. This happens in large institutions in the private sector as well, sections of companies building their own fiefdoms.
"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."
This is not how universities work. Remember, they're not for profit, so reducing costs means nothing unless your budget is slashed.
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.
Unfortunately it doesn't. If you hear the words 'efficiency' or 'value for money' being used at a UK university, it usually means they're about to announce a round of redundancies.
