He'll try to recruit the best students. Graduate programs are "greedy" for quality. In fact, graduate students are "greedy" for good jobs and struggle mightily to write dissertations that get them good jobs, and articles that get them some degree of notoriety.
He'll try to get grants or perks. Faculty are "greedy" when it comes to wanting money. They may wish that all faculty members everywhere got all the money, space, and resources they want, but they know it isn't going to happen. And they want to be first in line.
Some kids are greedy for good grades. Certainly not a finite resource. Still, while it's in the professor's power to grant complete satisfaction, I'm willing to bet that he doesn't say on day 1 of his lecture courses that "Every student will receive as high a grade as can be given." Without meaning, "as can be given provided you do all the work and learn the material at a high enough level." In other words, he probably will fail students and hand out a variety of Cs. (Or, since he probably also has grad classes, grades of B-, the "grad student's F".)
Many kids are "greedy" for prestige university names on their degrees. It sinks them in the end when they're not up to the standards at those schools, it allows the universities to charge more for tuition, etc.
Greed comes in many forms, not just in terms of that common metric of evaluating all things, currency. Some people approve of some forms of greed while disapproving of forms that don't affect them. They carefully define "greed" in ways that let them claim they do not fit the definition--and insist that theirs is the one true definition. Whatever the usage-based evidence says.
My wife was a prof with grad students. Churning out research published in peer review journals, asked for invited talks, etc., etc. But her students also didn't get jobs. She pondered the worth to society of producing PhDs that reliably failed to gain work in their field and decided her economic activity was injurious. So she considered whether it was the quality of the students, the quality of the mentorship and instruction, or other factors. The numbers weighed against what she was doing: In any year there were 10x as many grads as job openings. The kind of research she and her colleagues were doing and supervising wasn't getting her kids the jobs. She finally decided that she'd take a $35k/year pay cut to teach high school than continue to line her own pockets while producing PhDs that couldn't get jobs.While she's a Republican in every election that she's voted in for the last 10 years, she decided that greed wasn't good: The greed of drawing a decent salary that lets you do what you like while producing PhD students who work as waiters and waitresses wasn't for her. She valued a positive contribution to society coupled with a reduced negative contribution to society as more important than $.
Civilization is not necessarily a zero-sum game for resources. However, in some instances it very much is--or degenerates into a ponzi scheme. This, however, is a completely different issue from greed.
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