This is true. I am regularly shocked by the terrible business sense of university leaders, who use corporate lingo to justify self-feeding bureaucratic monstrosities.

we live in age of great moral panics about things that don’t matter and zero moral outrage over some of the most egregious societal sins we’ve ever seen

A university shouldn’t have “managers” on the academic payroll. Management is a specific means of running organisations and it’s fundamentally at odds with academic freedom. Academics should think very carefully before agreeing to become a “manager”.

The element of university collapse that none of the recent reports has taken account of is the rampant overreach of trustees and the total lack of any mechanism for actual university members (faculty; students; staff) to hold them accountable.

Admin bloat is, in large part, a jobs program for PhDs in fields that have become oversaturated due to decades of advanced degree overproduction despite low student demand for these majors. It is a classic case of budget-maximizing bureaucracy that adds little to education.

Can’t comment on the US specifics, but this is absolutely true of the UK. People often think of increasing admin in universities as just something that happened, but it is mostly a response to the ever-increasing regulatory burden.

if theres one thing we know from all of human history, its that when there is a surplus of young able bodied men that feel they have no purpose or future, that only very cool and good things can possibly happen

This is especially true in fundamental physics where the problems have become exceptionally difficult and require very long periods of deep thinking that are unsustainable in the modern production factory era of the academy. Knowledge production has become a hypercapitalist publication venture where small, quick, and risk-averse projects are valued over longterm high-risk ones that publish much less frequently. Peers are in a constant state of extreme competition for increasingly limited resources to produce as much as they can as fast as possible and with dwindling time for research among a myriad of other responsibilities. Meanwhile the career hierarchy has bloated with so many rungs before tenure that by the time a young person gets there their most creative years are behind them.

“What staggers me is how any man can prefer the galley-slave labour of transcription to the freeman’s work of attempting an essay on his own…”

Unis are not focused on education anymore. They are focused on income generation and, ultimately, managers' careers. Corrupt and incompetent VCs took away the intrinsic purpose of universities. This contributed to killing the instrumental purpose they once had for students.

You aren’t principled, you’re obstinate. And you don’t know the difference.

"Unless it's a top university, go to the cheapest one that you like." This is the right advice for those deciding on which college to attend when thinking about future employment Going to Boston University or Oberlin just won't matter h/t @auren

If you are a college professor it is extremely important for you to understand that you are at war with your senior administration. They are not your friends even if one of the deans used to teach in your department. They want to club to death everything you care about, and will.

“We embrace AI as not something we simply do…AI is part of who and how we are.” I’m going to say it for the thousandth time: the problem is not the cheating students. They are a symptom of a problem. The problem is that academic administrators are at war with education itself.

C. S. Lewis with maybe the most important paragraph ever written for people with creative ambitions

What if we stopped to consider that so much of the bad stuff in academia is due to ever worsening material and workplace conditions and ever-worsening bosses who contribute to and exacerbate all the other worsening(s)?

They’re not booing because they don’t want to work with AI, undergrads are basically already natives to AI, they’re booing because he glibly mentions things that will replace them and make an already challenging labor market more challenging (imported labor and AI).

Ironically, one of the best use-cases for AI in scientific writing is to act as a second set of eyes to catch errors in your manuscript that you have missed because of over-familiarity from reading it too many times.

At my doctoral defense one of the members of my committee was outraged that I quoted a scholar they had a personal beef with. It was a single citation for a minor establishment of fact not in question. I quoted nothing else by this author. Still, they refused to approve my dissertation until I agreed to remove it. I replaced it with a citation of the committee member instead. That was the only requested change by anyone on the committee for the entire dissertation.