I’m absolutely not defending academia as an industry. I did my time there, and I would never go back. To say that the overhead goes to flashy buildings and fat

I’m absolutely not defending academia as an industry. I did my time there, and I would never go back. To say that the overhead goes to flashy buildings and fat admin paychecks is a bit of a misrepresentation. Those buildings almost always have a major donor and a substantial endowment component. The academic (especially physical and biological science) divisions do actually need to pay for office space, lab space, heat, staff to run it, clean it, make the computers go, etc. If you think my salary was ballooning while building and running everyone’s HPC clusters, I can assure you it wasn’t in any sense other than perhaps slowly deflating over time. Compared to whatever the football coach and president are being paid, there are thousands of people on staff who aren’t getting those fat paychecks.