I watched this play out in a large university system. Seems to be largely the creeping expectations of faculty, doubly at the most prestigious institutions. F

I watched this play out in a large university system. Seems to be largely the creeping expectations of faculty, doubly at the most prestigious institutions. First of all faculty get about zero credit for teaching, it's really an afterthought and does not impact recruitment, career path, grants, or merits (increasing salary). So naturally many faculty push off as much of the teaching, preparing materials, grading, handling of office hours, labs, handling student questions, etc on others. Grad students are increasingly resistant to being overworked and distracted from their studied and research. So there's been in increase in walkouts, unionizing, and related activities. So where does an increasing fraction of the faculty support come from? Staff. Staff to help with technical writing, applying for grants, handling recruitments, serving on committees, and myriad of other demands. Not to mention indirect requirements like increasing IT demands, cybersecurity, remote learning, compliance officers, HR, security incident handling, inventory, metrics and reporting, etc. I've seen months of work generated by a single management request like "because of budget increase foo, we want to track the success of the last decade of graduates ..." The most successful research universities can have research budgets on the order of $1B a year, pretty much independent of the number of undergrads they teach. Teaching is really a secondary concern. Thus undergrads/staff varies widely.