Academics who see this as an academia-only thing don't understand that the same growth of bureaucracy that happened to them has happened in every large company too. It's kind of the natural order of things once the dedicated bureaucrats get a foothold.
Someone else has already alluded to this, but do you think it's possible for any organization of appreciable size to not develop "dedicated bureaucrats"?
One answer to a stagnant oligarchy is a populist king/dictator that gets absolute executive power and massively reduces complexity. But that can get very ugly...
