A lot of good answers have dealt with various individual problems. I want to address the meta-problem: Academia, as an institution, does not have a close conn

A lot of good answers have dealt with various individual problems. I want to address the meta-problem: Academia, as an institution, does not have a close connection between the factors that make it money (students paying $$$) and high quality university administration. To put it another way, there are systemic economic or market based forces driving institutional change in academia's leadership model. Individual deans and department heads may or may not run their faculties well. But there is no external enforcement mechanism that pushes said deans and department heads to do a good job. Much less the mushrooming number of non-academic staff in most universities. Where increasingly lay administration is absorbing 20-40% of the overall institutional budget or more, with excuses of various kinds. The students keep coming, and keep paying. Change only happens when political will accumulates to the point that top down governance is imposed on the academic department. Usually however, this only occurs (in an academic department) when the research output causes a drop in the university's rankings. And the time between bad leadership, and it impacting research output, is enormous.