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Just chatting with @nebogeo and decided that universities are basically just landlords now - renting out space for academics to work in exchange for overheads on their grants, but then also trying to rent the academics out to students (who pay fees) and businesses (who they hope will pay consultancy rates).
@amberfirefly @nebogeo this aligns very much to my experiences working with unis from 2007 - 2012. They tended to be quite inept at it back then, and were often like weird little business cults performing rituals. It was nonetheless obvious most people were going to end up very stressed, and only the really mercenary and commercially minded faculty were doing well in those conditions
@nach @nebogeo yeah absolutely - I think of them very much like cults as well, and/or pyramid schemes - especially the persistence of the myths that any other job is boring/bad, or that people have failed if they choose to leave. I left that world in 2015 thankfully but we work adjacent to the sector now and it seems to only be getting worse. The mental and physical health fallout for people is just so off the scale.
@amberfirefly @nebogeo yeah it's absolutely insane, from every angle. My last work in that area was looking through a uni's facilities to see which could be commercialised for the videogames industry. There were loads of facilities, some unique, that could have been. But *every* case study I did based on another uni or a studio that had hired one resulted in the answer "Don't, it's likely to be a disaster". Client wasn't pleased; they hadn't hired me to figure out the truth for them 
