I share the sentiment of your post but as an academic, I think you are wrong and the OP is right. The older academic generations have literally built this syst

I share the sentiment of your post but as an academic, I think you are wrong and the OP is right. The older academic generations have literally built this system and then no point to it as inherent and unable to be changed. They point to socially constructed parts of our faculty experience and claim that it 'is'. It is the truest example of stupid smart people I have ever experienced. it is fundamentally, laziness and self-interest. They complain about the system that they built - they complain about administrators, who are all either faculty or people brought in to do things faculty complained about doing or turned out to be wildly bad at. I'll give a couple specific examples: 1) Faculty development offices - faculty complain ENDLESSLY about faculty development offices and programs and staff. They feel they are interfering with The reality is they were created for a bunch of reasons - largely because the many faculty had stopped investing time in mentoring their peers, and when that did happen it was often wildly sexist and racist. So it got replaced with people trained to do the job well, overseen by faculty. Much of there work is on teaching faculty to teach - because faculty doing the hiring don't bother to evaluate candidates on that core competency. Now the faculty complain about 'bloat' and about the documentation that is generated. 2) IT - I worked at an institution where the faculty senate basically called a meeting to lambast the head of IT because the laptop specification suggested for students couldn't do [thing]. The head of IT shared the history of his office...it had been a faculty member's job (they had a teaching release to do the work) and no one wanted to do it, so they hired someone and setup a faculty oversight board, then they couldn't get any faculty to participate, so then they stopped the oversight board and just sent a survey of needs to all the faculty, they got almost no responses. So the IT person did their best. Faculty had control, complained about the work, and then complained that they weren't consulted. In prior generations, tenure and academic freedom were tools that enabled faculty to work collaboratively and collegially to run a good university. Several generations of faculty have transformed tenure into a reward for doing lots of research. Unsurprisingly, once it became a reward rather than a tool it gets abused...and faculty fight so hard for things that serve themselves at the expense of the university that they find themselves standing on the outside, in the cold, with their trophy, and presume someone is out to get them.