Given that American universities now routinely have a lot more administrators than teaching staff (still very untypical elsewhere in the world), wouldn't you at least agree that the bureaucratic bloat is real?
This is, after all, what the students are paying in their tuition, which is becoming a major burden on the American middle class.
(Ironically, "tuition" as a word promises that the money is mostly spent on teaching, not on administration and amenities.)
There is a strange reluctance on the American liberal left to criticize greediness in academia or even acknowledge that such thing exists. Politically, I get it, the academia is overwhelmingly liberal-left, so there is an instinct not to alienate it. But there surely must be some upper bound to the growth of tuition costs, after which the burden becomes unbearable.
politically I think it's more that in America, administrative positions skew heavily towards the political left in or outside Academia. There's a whole theory of analysing American politics based on the idea that the 'professional managerial class' (i.e. salaried administrative types) have interests that are better taken care of by the democratic party and vote accordingly.
I think the cognitive dissonance is more that administrative types want to think of their positions as necessary to the proper functioning of things.
