Academia as business

One of the forces behind the "crapification" of academic life (see here) is the fact that it is increasingly being managed by "bidnessmen."  Part of this is because governments have decided to drop support for universities (the cold war is over and we beat the Russians) and the shortfall needs to made up from somewhere so universities have effectively turned themselves into fund raising machines and heading up a supercharged money grubber making machine requires the unctuous talents that only big bucks can attract. So, as Chomsky might put it, universities are no longer educational institutions and endowments but endowments with educational institutions.  As all good minimalists know, being after a with means being of lesser significance!

At any rate, (here) is a piece that discusses some of the current dynamics.  The ever increasing bureaucratization of the university is not a bug that can be eliminated, but a feature of how things are done now.  Given the current state of play, universities do need alternative sources of funding and rich people and corporations (other "kinds" of people, at least in the USA) are the obvious source.  Catering to these sources of income requires work and the people that are good at it, not surprisingly, are only tangentially interested in what universities do. The figures on the relative growth rates of faculty to administrators and the relevant salary comparisons are significant, IMO. It's not actually clear that much can be done, but it's worth knowing that this is no accident. It's just how things work now.