I went to one of the schools mentioned in TFA (the one with a real engineering program) and thankfully didn’t deal with any of the bloated positions mentioned;

I went to one of the schools mentioned in TFA (the one with a real engineering program) and thankfully didn’t deal with any of the bloated positions mentioned; I just did my classes, project teams, and professional orgs and got out in three years. In hindsight, I seem to have lucked out in just being able to put my head down and do the actual academic things I was in college for. In my recent time in grad school at a private university, I was at least aware of most of the positions mentioned. Some were invaluable, specifically those mediating the lopsided power dynamic between professors and students (which is a whole other problem); others seemed like they picked Twitter buzzwords out of a hat and threw them together into a job posting. My inner cynical accelerationist almost wishes for a brain drain from academia so the Ivory Towers can be torn down and built anew.