"Looting" is an entirely accurate description, and it is a fairly well-studied consequence of institutional structures that allow managers to pay themselves eno

"Looting" is an entirely accurate description, and it is a fairly well-studied consequence of institutional structures that allow managers to pay themselves enormous amounts while bankrupting or otherwise destroying the organization they have been charged with taking care of: http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/projects/bpea/1993%202/1993b_bpea_akerlof_romer_hall_mankiw.pdf http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/projects/bpea/1993%202/1993... The linked paper was written in 1993, and twenty years later looting is still going on, especially in the American banking industry. But it's happening in higher ed all over the place, as professional managers take over from academics in the running of universities. The change is understandable in its motivation: academics are terrible managers. The problem is that academics have very different incentives from professional managers, and the checks and balances in university organizations have not been adapted to the new management, creating precisely the conditions of "poor accounting, lax regulation, or low penalties for abuse" that make looting inevitable.