Excerpt:

Back in August, the Wall Street Journal ran a long article on the insane spending of American public universities, with special emphasis on their proclivity for expensive building projects. This is an issue very close to my heart. I spent over a decade in American academia, at several different very wealthy institutions, and every semester of my experience was marred by major, highly disruptive, noisy and openly unnecessary building.

Near the end of my time at that school, some faculty committee produced an assessment of campus facilities and how they had grown over the years. I was amazed to find that, despite hundreds of millions wasted on construction since 2000, classroom and faculty office space remained stubbornly insufficient and had not expanded for decades.

Federally-backed student loans increased the amount that schools could charge, and as they raised tuition to claim this money, they had to do something with it. For the most part, that something amounted to expanding the ranks of those cadres responsible for spending money, namely the administrators and their subordinate staff, as well as those things which administrators manage, such as buildings and the building of them.

Yale University, to take just one example, hired more than 1,500 new administrative staff in the sixteen years between 2003 and 2019. Many of these managers have baffling titles and either provide no obvious services or are actively annoying.

As anybody who has ever used Wikipedia knows, the site is constantly begging for donations, frequently with obtrusive banners.

These appeals have worked: The Wikimedia Foundation has pulled in millions of dollars, even as the cost of web hosting (about $2.5 million/year) has remained constant. As it turns out, less than half of the Wikimedia budget has anything to do with running Wikipedia.

They have not taken the high road and poured the excessive donations into Wikipedia itself, which is surely what the their donors expected them to do... Instead, we see again the ominous middle path: The institution itself has absorbed the money and expanded its managerial staff beyond all necessity.

While the Wikimedia Foundation surely hope to further their political goals with their dumb grant-making, the bewildering variety of funds, projects and initiatives they run has a much more immediate purpose, in that it gives the bloated organisation something to do. In fact a great many of these philanthropic organisations, viewed with a more cynical eye, seem to exist primarily as make-work projects for staff who pass money around among themselves.