More like academics have ceded control of the ivory tower to adminstrators. It's been happening for decades: Senior academics should be mentoring junior academics and managing the university functions on their behalf, so that junior academics, the bright sparks they are, can change the world.
But instead we have senior academics who continue to pursue their own research interests all the way into retirement, while shunning all administrative tasks as "beneath them." This leaves a leadership vacuum at the top, which of course is filled by professional "leaders." The academics only have themselves to blame.
You are spot on. A few minutes before I saw your comment I put something along similar lines.
In fact a similar observation can be made of life in general. Tyrants often to the top because people have ceded control to them, slowly. It's the boiling frog phenomena. Things are not noticed until it's too late.
Sure many academics today lack the job security to stand up for themselves, but that's only because a whole generation of ultra-powerful tenure-track faculty before them allowed this to happen. Also you'd have to be an idiot not to realise that universities were intentionally over-producing post-docs to create an easily exploitable labour pool. The lack of job security is not some act of god, but the product of a corrupt system in which academics once had absolute power.
The whole institution should be considered a damning indictment of the sort of people who aspire(d) to become academics. As in there is something seriously wrong with them at the characterological level. Usually institutions decline due to various external pressures which creates internal faults. Whereas in this case an omnipotent clerisy simply spent a lot of time not working, exploited underlings and took credit for their work while fornicating with the more of attractive of them (and no, not in a 'and then they married and lived happily ever-after way', as in every year profs would sleep with multiple very young women, that was a perk of the job for boomers).
But instead we have senior academics who continue to pursue their own research interests all the way into retirement, while shunning all administrative tasks as "beneath them." This leaves a leadership vacuum at the top, which of course is filled by professional "leaders." The academics only have themselves to blame.