A possibility for ‘who wants this’ is the faculty themselves, right? There’s been a steady increase in the number of people who actually have PhDs which might not be rising concomitantly with employment opportunities. More PhDs might lobby for universities to provide a greater diversity of courses, necessitating the creation of more employment opportunities for those PhDs. Since universities are subsidized and demand isn’t a great limiting factor on their behavior, lobbying by PhDs might be effective. (It’s possible to think of some reasons for this: administrators making decisions might want more PhDs either out of class solidarity—if they have PhDs themselves or think of themselves as academics in some sense—or out of a desire for power—since more PhDs employed at the college might add to its prestige, or give you more people to ‘rule’ over in a certain sense. Administrators are probably more directly invested in growing the raw number of administrators, of course, but growing the number of faculty might be an effective way of justifying administrative growth.)
A possibility for ‘who wants this’ is the faculty themselves, right? There’s been a steady increase in the number of people who actually have PhDs which might not be rising concomitantly with employment opportunities. More PhDs might lobby for universities to provide a greater diversity of courses, necessitating the creation of more employment opportunities for those PhDs. Since universities are subsidized and demand isn’t a great limiting factor on their behavior, lobbying by PhDs might be effective. (It’s possible to think of some reasons for this: administrators making decisions might want more PhDs either out of class solidarity—if they have PhDs themselves or think of themselves as academics in some sense—or out of a desire for power—since more PhDs employed at the college might add to its prestige, or give you more people to ‘rule’ over in a certain sense. Administrators are probably more directly invested in growing the raw number of administrators, of course, but growing the number of faculty might be an effective way of justifying administrative growth.)