Do universities favor experimentalists over theoreticians? This question is based off the following chain of reasoning:


Universities employ professors, who write funding applications and win grants. The university then takes some fraction of the grant as "overheads" which counts as part of its "income".
Therefore universities prefer professors who win big grants (the number of grants matter less than the total amount of money won).
Experimentalists need more money than theoreticians. I would expect that theoreticians only need some software &amp; computers, but experimentalists would need the equipment itself (MRI machines, vacuum chambers, etc) which are orders of magnitude more expensive than mere desktop computers.
Therefore experimentalists win bigger grants.
Therefore universities prefer experimentalists.


I'm wondering if this chain of reasoning is robust. It looks pretty convincing to me. Conceivably the university could have separate grant targets for theoreticians and experimentalists, but presumably some professors aren't easily classified into either theoretician or experimentalist, which would make this an easily-gamed metric.
Potential for grants is surely something that universities consider, but I think your analysis is too simplistic to lead to the conclusion "universities prefer experimentalists".

For one thing, a department typically needs to offer a range of courses involving both theory and experiment, so they need faculty who are qualified to teach them.  The decision to hire in a particular field is more likely to be driven by academic needs, and so the question of whether to hire a theoretician or an experimentalist probably doesn't often arise as such.

Another point is one you raised yourself: Experimentalists need more money than theoreticians.  This cuts both ways.

Suppose they hire an experimentalist.  First of all, she is going to need a big start-up package from the university in order to get her research to the point where she can get grants.  There's a risk that she won't ever get to that point, in which case the university's investment doesn't pay off.  And maybe she does bring in some big grant money for a while, but years down the road, maybe her funding dries up.  Maybe her research area just isn't as hot anymore, or funding agencies are preferring to go in a different direction.  Without major funding, she can't do her research at all, and now the university is stuck with an unproductive faculty member.  So hiring an experimentalist may be high reward, but also high risk. 

By contrast, a theoretician doesn't need a large short-term injection of funds, and they know that she will be able to be productive regardless of what happens to her funding.