Played a game the other day with University + Pillage. Pillage is known for being an underwhelming card, some of its drawbacks:
1. It's too slow. Once you buy pillage, you have to wait to draw and play it, and then you have to wait again until you draw the spoils to use the spoils it gives to generate actual economy from it.
2. The attack, while it can be good, sometimes doesn't do a whole lot.
3. It's usually not worth using a buy and 5 coins on.
University often helps address all of these. On a board with enough of an engine to draw the deck (not too hard to achieve with university), you can often play the pillage the same turn you gain it (and then maybe even play the spoils too if you have enough draw), speeding things up considerably (addressing point 1).
For the 2nd point, the attack can actually be quite powerful in this situation if you can use it to prevent your opponent from firing. If the engine consists of say university for actions and some sort of terminal draw, then unless your opponent has at least 2 of each of these in hand, a pillage play means your opponent probably won't be able to kick off. This is nice, especially if you're playing pillage every turn (easier to do because of point 1).
For the 3rd point, well, you're just going to gain pillage with University. Probably your 5 universities are giving you plenty of gains of action cards so this is a pretty low cost.
The game I played had these two cards along with chapel and patrol and no other villages or draw (as well as no other coin from action cards). Pretty much the ideal situation for pillage being good, though I suspect that pillage and university still work well together even in somewhat less favorable circumstances.