I recently applied to the faculty job market and wrote a diversity statement. I have also served on the hiring end (last year), and have heard enough to underst

I recently applied to the faculty job market and wrote a diversity statement. I have also served on the hiring end (last year), and have heard enough to understand that the content in this statement will neither make nor break your case, but is an additional datapoint that the committee takes into consideration. I hope the OP understands I was being mostly sarcastic, but really they wrote a (imo) uninformed post about the university life which is far from the reality at the research-oriented institutions I've passed through in the past 10 years. Thanks for the additional datapoint. Speaking seriously, I am on the same page about bloat and there is a very real danger of it especially in the UC and other state school systems. Maybe private institutions are more robust to bloat since there is less protection for non-tenured employment. Generally the trend to hiring XM$/yr administrators as university heads is worrying, but I am not sure what the fix for it is in the endless competition for endowment and donor money. Last edit: check out "Bullshit Jobs" by David Graeber if you haven't already. You may not agree with his politics or his prescriptions, but the book is a funny and highly alarming wakeup call to the proliferation of useless jobs (part of the book discusses bloat in university administrations).