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Naturally, universities like Penn, Vanderbilt, USC, and Pitt would rather take out cost-cutting on graduate students and faculty than administration and staff. A combination of malicious compliance and self-interest—it reminds me of those graphs that show the growth in number of administration and staff far outpacing the growth in faculty and students over the past few decades.
It makes for a good sob story that Orange Man is rug-pulling the next generation of young scientists, each of whom would surely had gone on to do great things like finding the cure for cancer or implementing Star Trek's replicator (as opposed to the typical path(s) of eking out some marginal publications in graduate school to graduate before falling out of academia, or moving on to continue the publish-or-perish flailing with marginal publications as a postdoc, young faculty member, tenure-track faculty member, etc.). A better sob story than dismissing administrators en masse, where any news articles might cause even normies to ask "wait, why were there so many of these people working or ‘working’ there in the first place?" along the lines of the Claudine Gay resignation.
The status of American universities is like a dark comedy out in the open, where the parasite has taken over the host. Supposed institutes of higher learning, research, and teaching serve as daycares for young adults first (there's even bread—mealplans! and circuses—colleges sports!), make-work for administrators second, research a distant third, and teaching a fourth from there.
If someone would just yank student loans, they'd be restricted to their core purpose. Unfortunately, nobody can.
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