The never ending supply of administrators

Malcolm Harris writes about Bad Education at the n+1 website:

As faculty jobs have become increasingly contingent and precarious, administration has become anything but. Formerly, administrators were more or less teachers with added responsibilities; nowadays, they function more like standard corporate managers—and they’re paid like them too. Once a few entrepreneurial schools made this switch, market pressures compelled the rest to follow the high-revenue model, which leads directly to high salaries for in-demand administrators. Even at nonprofit schools, top-level administrators and financial managers pull down six- and seven-figure salaries, more on par with their industry counterparts than with their fellow faculty members. And while the proportion of tenure-track teaching faculty has dwindled, the number of managers has skyrocketed in both relative and absolute terms. If current trends continue, the Department of Education estimates that by 2014 there will be more administrators than instructors at American four-year nonprofit colleges. A bigger administration also consumes a larger portion of available funds, so it’s unsurprising that budget shares for instruction and student services have dipped over the past fifteen years.

Mark Perry at the Carpe Diem blog notes,

Hey, where I teach (University of Michigan-Flint), we're way ahead of the national trend - the administrative/professional ranks outnumbered the full-time faculty (tenured, tenure-track and full-time instructors/lecturers) years ago, starting in 2005 (see chart above).

And before you ask the situation in New Zealand isn't that much different. We also seem to have a never ending supply of administrators, doing I don't know what. One thing is for sure they aren't teaching or doing research, which is what I thought universities are there for.