While in general I agree that there are too many administrators at many universities, this type of argument is ineffective without pointing out exactly which administrators. And I find that once you try to do that, no one agrees which administrators should be cut. Do you want to cut the administrators responsible for diversity and inclusion? Or the administrators responsible for tech transfer? Or the Dean of the College? Or administrators that manage grants? Or administrators of admissions, or athletics, title IX, or school of medicine?For a start, let's cut any administrator that was not considered needed for the proper running of a university 30 years ago. So we can start with the administrators responsible for diversity and inclusion and tech transfer. You can probably also get rid of most of the administrators administering grants, athletics, and title IX.
Give us some specifics to discuss. Because while almost everyone agrees administration needs to be trimmed, if everyone just wants to keep the ones they think are important and there's not much overlap, then there's clearly no way to do this.
The argument, "We can't cut anyone if we can't all agree on who to cut" is a recipe for, "We will cut everyone after we go bankrupt." Those bankruptcies are already starting. And before COVID-19 is over, plenty of universities that can't figure out how to do layoffs of administrators are going to have to do just that.
Education has been on an unsustainable path for decades. It is widely recognized that it is unsustainable. As Stein's law says, "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." But before we get there we get to see the truth of Stanisford's corollaries, "It will go on a lot longer than we think" and "It will end badly when it does stop."
It has gone on a lot longer than I thought it could 20 years ago. However COVID-19 has changed the equation enough to end business as usual, and now we get to see how bad the ending is. The more that administrators cling to keeping business as usual, the worse that they will make things for themselves.