This Piece by David Pozen is excellent, non-partisan and uses a lot of economic reasoning. Here is just an excerpt from a much broader treatment:
For all the talk about how the modern university has been corporatized, neoliberalizedand so on, not as much attention has been paid to how it was presidentialized.
The presidentialization of Colombia dates back well before the current moment. Our last president, Lee Bollinger, led the university for more than two decades. During his tenure, Bollinger oversaw the rise of an important administrative apparatus: Columbia’s ten highest-paid employees, excluding surgeons, are now all senior executives – as well as the creation of a dizzying group painting of research centers, policy institutes, and global programs that operate more or less independently of academic departments. Bollinger’s office also launched countless small projects with discretionary funds. After the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, for example, he came up with the idea for a Constitutional Democracy Initiative (with which I am affiliated) and, within weeks, an impressive new organization was established . Meanwhile, most widely representative The campus body, the University Senate, seemed to become less and less relevant with each passing year.
And on the endowments:
Over the past generation, having a large endowment has become much more than a means to support long-standing institutional goals; it has become an end in itself, a key measure of a university’s prestige and the performance of its president. And because most philanthropists dislike funding boring old operating budgets, increasing the endowment is often done through conditional gifts intended to encourage new initiatives, as evidenced by the proliferation of centers, d institutes and extra-departmental programs mentioned above. Once launched, these tuition-free entities—and all the jobs, academic fiefdoms, and student opportunities that come with them—only increase the demand for continued giving.
There are other interesting points on the link, notably on Title IX, recommended. For the pointer, I thank Anecdotal.
