Spoken like someone who doesn't know how university budgets work. ;)

Generally university budgets are done on a year-to-year (or biennium-to-biennium) basis.  There's no guarantee money you have now will be there next year, and in fact anything you don't spend in a given budget year disappears.  The result is it's often easy to get money for one-time purchases, but arranging regular payment for things like software subscriptions is nearly impossible.

As you can imagine, the recent move by places like Adobe to software-as-a-service subscription models is causing a lot of angst here.