The author is clearly complaining from a conservative, free-market viewpoint, but it's difficult to overlook that the conservative, free-market ideology that triumphed in the Reagan-Thatcher era has been a major driver of the complaints voiced here. The late-sixties to early-nineties free-for-all at universities was partly due to an understanding of the university as a place for the betterment of the population in the form of a largely-subsidized public good. This also tied into concepts like tenure and academic freedom which insulated students and educators from the surrounding society, and allowed students to run organizations and modify or vandalize campus property without consequence, with the benefits and costs that entailed.
Today the university is largely re-imagined in the conservative mold. It is foremost an elite job-training site, and includes not only the cosmopolitan social training that companies demand of 21st-century knowledge workers, but free-market costs commensurate with the expected value of the degree in the vocational sphere. Administration has been handed over to a business class walled off from the educators, for fear of academics running the show, with predictable results of fiefdom-building. Tenured educators are disappearing and being replaced with the adjunct precariat, another conservative win. This all contributes to an atmosphere where the stakes of any action are very high for both students and university employees, and danger abounds, whether it be from lawsuits or from the possibility of being forced out of school and suffering lifelong consequences as a result. It's perplexing to see this laid at the feet of academics, when one needs look no further than other bastions of the conservative mindset, like HOAs or corporate HR departments, to find organizations that would be similarly displeased with an ad-hoc island in a common-area water feature.
Today the university is largely re-imagined in the conservative mold. It is foremost an elite job-training site, and includes not only the cosmopolitan social training that companies demand of 21st-century knowledge workers, but free-market costs commensurate with the expected value of the degree in the vocational sphere. Administration has been handed over to a business class walled off from the educators, for fear of academics running the show, with predictable results of fiefdom-building. Tenured educators are disappearing and being replaced with the adjunct precariat, another conservative win. This all contributes to an atmosphere where the stakes of any action are very high for both students and university employees, and danger abounds, whether it be from lawsuits or from the possibility of being forced out of school and suffering lifelong consequences as a result. It's perplexing to see this laid at the feet of academics, when one needs look no further than other bastions of the conservative mindset, like HOAs or corporate HR departments, to find organizations that would be similarly displeased with an ad-hoc island in a common-area water feature.