Producing students, research, or outreach now involves a wide range of campus professionals. There are two points here. First, in U.S. universities, professors are no longer the only profession on campus. A second point is that managerial workforces are not cheap. Some public research universities have seen an absolute decline in faculty numbers over the past five years, more than counterbalanced by an increase in numbers of administrators and support professionals, leading to increased institutional expenditures.
Managerial personnel cost more than faculty.
Stratification is so steep that on the same campus there are entry-level faculty in one field who can make more than full professors in another field. And income dispersion is increasing. Moreover, social relations on campus are increasingly corporatized, as faculty find their time, work, and the products of their labor increasingly controlled by managers, who have extended their discretion at the expense of professional autonomy, and arguably of the public interest. Neither pattern is an easy fit for most Western democracies. With the U.S. market model comes the assumption that managers, like fathers, know best.