I'm at a school that underwent a grad student unionisation drive, and pretty much everything that the union proposed would have amounted to further empowering the administration at the expense of the academics (e.g. introducing new mediator officials with extensive compulsive power over advisors if their students should feel wronged in one way or another, hiring more staff to enforce diversity-friendly admissions and hiring outcomes, ...). At least the politicised end of the student body seems to consider the administration, rather than the academics, to be their natural ally.
> and, more importantly, the justification provided by the student groups that organized those votes
Can you give a summary of your proposals here? Skimmed the Seery article and it doesn't seem to have anything directly related to the tax code, but could be missing it.
This is just patently false.
The criticism of admin bloat by faculty and students precedes the right-wing press criticism by decades, is far more harsh, and is still going strong.
The whole damn criticism, as it exists in the popular press today, can be traced quite directly back to academia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Ginsberg_(political_s...
Or a more recent example, https://home.isi.org/sites/default/files/MA59.3_Seery_Sympos...
And from the student perspective, the recent votes at places like Chicago to unionize (and, more importantly, the justification provided by the student groups that organized those votes)
Far from complicit, faculty and students are leading the charge, and have been since the 1980s.
BTW, if you wanted to curtail administrative bloat/power in universities, there are ways to use the tax code and science funding policy to do so. and lots of serious policy proposals by the people listed above would very likely have great effect.
This policy targets students instead.