It's mostly caused by the explosion of lifestyle inflation at universities. Rather than just providing an education and doing research they are now expected to be mental health counselors, promote "diversity" (aka we need more of certain skin colors over other skin colors), and make "democratic" decisions. In practice this means everything is filled with bureaucracy and you need to go through 5 committees and 3 vice chancellors before anything gets done.
Football and basketball are actually profitable at most R1 schools, even though the coaches make lots of money.
Diversity is fundamentally the antithesis of elite schools. The goal of elite schools is to be exclusive. "Inclusive" and "exclusive" are antonyms.
Elite schools artificially limit supply for brand management. There are incredibly complex politics which govern who is admitted, balancing:
- Intellect, since that improves brand
- Connections to power, since that improves brand (e.g. George Bush Jr)
- Appearances of diversity (e.g. having lots of skin colors), since the opposite hurts brand
- Donations
- Athletics, since that gives visibility and improves brand
... and so on.
A lot of this is about mixing the rich/powerful with the brilliant. The former look brilliant by association. The latter gain connections to wealth and power.
Diversity consultants are one piece of the corrupt equation.
The alternative is a university ecosystem which doesn't label everyone with university brand stamps, and aims to provide a quality education to everyone. There are countries with those, and they do well. Even taking other cultures out of the equation, Canada is much closer to that ideal than the US, as is continental Europe.
Because these deans of "diversity" get paid a lot of money to bikeshed about useless issues while not actually having any impact on the school. It's run exclusively as a PR stunt to satisfy the whiners in the school. It's one example of the many cases of unneeded, useless headcount in universities that's contributing to bloat. I can't name a single time where anyone with the word diversity in their title at my former college did anything concrete.
> US universities do not run as democracies. The appointed deans and the president run the show.
That's not really the case especially in public universities. If you want to make a change that might step on a lot of toes you need to get buy in from people. They aren't explicit democracies where everyone votes, but nonetheless you need to secure acceptance from people to get things done.
To give you an example of the useless bureaucracy, I once had to submit a reimbursement for some research expenses and was bounced around for several months between different forms and different people. Any 1 part of the reimbursement that didn't match the forms exactly meant the entire thing would be rejected. This was to access grant money that wasn't even the university's, it was the lab's. In corporate settings people don't give a shit and approve it as long as it looks legitimate.
Football and basketball are actually profitable at most R1 schools, even though the coaches make lots of money.