It's actually the opposite, I believe--- equipment expenditures over $5k with expected lifetime >1 yr are considered capital purchases improving the university's facilities, rather than expenses, and not subject to overhead.
It leads to weird situations where it's actually cheaper to load up your $4k server with $1k in crap you don't really need, to turn it into a capital improvement.
That's actually very curious, because the stories I've heard are exactly the opposite of that -- building $100k servers $1k at a time, etc. Perhaps every school skims off the top in a different way.
It leads to weird situations where it's actually cheaper to load up your $4k server with $1k in crap you don't really need, to turn it into a capital improvement.