The evolution of university governance

This David Pozen piece is excellent, non-partisan, and uses plenty of economic reasoning.  Here is just one excerpt from a much broader treatment:

For all the talk of how the modern university has been corporatized, neoliberalized, and so on, there hasn’t been as much attention paid to the ways in which it has been presidentialized.

The presidentialization of Columbia dates back well before the current moment. Our last president, Lee Bollinger, ran the university for over two decades. During his tenure, Bollinger oversaw the rise of a substantial administrative apparatus—the ten highest paid Columbia employees, apart from surgeons, are now all senior executives—as well as the creation of a dizzying array of research centers, policy institutes, and global programs that operate more or less independently of the academic departments. Bollinger’s office also launched countless smaller projects with discretionary funds. After the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, for instance, he came up with the idea for a Constitutional Democracy Initiative (with which I am affiliated) and, within weeks, an impressive new outfit was up and running. Meanwhile, the most broadly representative body on campus, the University Senate, seemed to become less relevant with every passing year.

And on endowments:

Over the past generation or so, having a large endowment has become something more than a means to support longstanding institutional goals; it has become an end in itself, a key measure of a university’s prestige and its president’s performance. And because most philanthropists don’t like to fund boring old operating budgets, expanding the endowment is often accomplished through conditional gifts for enticing new endeavors, as reflected in the proliferation of extra-departmental centers, institutes, and programs referred to above. Once launched, these non-tuition-receiving entities—and all the jobs, faculty fiefdoms, and student opportunities that come with them—only tend to increase the demand for ongoing donations.

There are further interesting points at the link, including about Title IX, recommended.  For the pointer I thank Anecdotal.