[maiar]

They should have stayed rare, but they’re a way for universities to get free money from the government as well as a temporary (but sadly permanent) fix for academia’s deep structural problems.

[musicale]

Why pay for more of those expensive, unruly, hard-to-fire professors when you can hire cheap adjuncts and postdocs to do teaching and research?

The administrative organization continues to expand, and it must be paid for somehow.

[KingMob]

Bureaucracy has gone up, sure, but not nearly as much as the number of people seeking PhDs.

That also used to be much less common back in the day.