Universities are broke – let’s cut the pointless admin and get back to teaching

The second half of the article is prescriptive but short on details. What does it mean to require "people to fully carry out their own fanciful ideas"? Does it mean that someone who decides the trash should be collected every other day rather than every day, should actually collect the trash?

Like many people, I'm attracted by headlines which align with my own biases. But my level of bias here is unchanged after reading the article!

All of that was pretty similar then, and this was when UC tuition was still very, very reasonable.

The main difference, maybe, was that at that time the experience was less controlled, and less managed. The dorm I lived in first year was run by fourth year undergrads and grad students, and their responsibility was basically to make sure that no one was opening vodka bottles in the common room, or setting off smoke detectors with bongs or puking in the elevator. They were compensated with free or heavily reduced room and board.

The experience was less controlled and less micro managed across all aspects of university life at that time, and even more so prior. My admittedly unsubstantiated viewpoint is that the proliferation of control mechanisms, and transition of traditionally subsidized experience management to formal salaried roles is a big contributor to the unnecessary increase in bureaucracy, and it has a negative long term effect on learning from both the academic and the 'experience' side of things.

My institution offers a seven-year combined BS/MD program. Graduate on time, get an MCAT score above the national mean and a decent GPA, and after 3 years you are automatically admitted to the institution's medical school. One requirement for admission into this program is an ACT score >= 32. Of this cohort, only 60 % made the cut.

60 % is low. This can't all be students that transferred out because the undergrad instruction is too awful or are otherwise incapable. I would put the blame squarely on the irrelevant curriculum and also would not hire anyone from that place because the level of instruction is just too low.

That probably doesn't make you feel great, but as a percentage of costs, faculty salaries are still the biggest expense at all schools I know of.

Staff for non-academic activities outside of the VP chain and coaches are also generally much lower than faculty salaries - Student life, activities, diversity, etc are closer to what you make.