Why are we so miserable?

Academic staff in universities are getting more and more miserable. Earlier this year the Times Higher Education Supplement published their Best University Workplace Survey. Especially when compared with the last such exercise, it tells a worrying tale. In brief, unfairly crude summary: academic staff are getting more miserable and administrators are getting happier. Academics still mostly enjoy teaching and/or research but are less and less happy with the running of their institutions and the managerial demands placed on them. The Times Higher suggests this might be a temporary side-effect of the REF but the fact is that many academics have deep-seated anxieties over the long-term direction of higher education. Some of them have put these views in the public domain. Here's a small sample:

• Stefan Collini's is one of the leading voices. Here's an example in a book review; see also What Are Universities For?
• The Strange Death of the Liberal University, Michael Bailey
• The Slow Death of the University, Terry Eagleton
• How should universities be run to get the best out of people?, David Colquhoun - "...describes an effect of corporatisation in the medical school of Imperial College London, but the same trends are visible in universities throughout the world"
• Council for the Defence of British Universities
• The war against humanities at Britain's universities This Guardian article makes many forceful points about marketisation in British universities. It's a big shame it opposes sciences and humanities. As the comments show, that's not helpful; a distraction. In a response to a different article, here are some very good further comments on this "opposition".

People sign up to academia with definite ideas of the higher education project but they find a world evolving rapidly away from those basic principles. Of course they're miserable.