Are universities run more and more like businesses? What are the consequences?
I'm not going to answer your career questions, but just the title whether universities are run like businesses:
Over the past 20 years (with longer roots), universities have largely been stripped of the substantial state contributions that have financed operations before then. It used to be the fact that states funded the majority of university expenditures because (i) that provided an education for the young people of the state at a small cost, and (ii) the research done at universities translated into state-of-the-art knowledge in the state that led to highly educated students, start-up companies, companies that want to have offices in the state because they needed that knowledge, etc. In return for these state contributions, universities were run in a manner that had the welfare of the state as its top concern -- which includes a focus on education and research. Both provided great flexibility to faculty as long as they reasonably looked towards the bigger goals.
But states no longer provide that money for a variety of mostly political reasons: For example, my own university now receives less than 10% of its budget from the state of Colorado. This comes with consequences:

We rely on student tuition for much more substantial part of our revenue, and so keeping students happy is an important consideration (whether they deserve it or not).
We rely on out-of-state student tuition to a much larger degree because the out-of-state tuition rate is not subject to political pressure that universities are still subject to despite the fact that the state no longer provides a substantial part of the budget. To attract out-of-state students, they need to be treated like the customers of a business.
We rely on Federal and private research dollars much more than we used to. There is substantially greater pressure on faculty to bring in these research dollars than there used to be.

So when people say &quot;universities are run like businesses today&quot;, what they really mean in some sense is that there is greater pressure on paying attention to students (&quot;customers&quot;) and to go after research grants than there used to be. One can complain about that all day long, but the reality is that that is in large parts a function of how the income sources of universities have shifted, and what the expectations of those who provide this income are today (students, research funders: wanting to get a good education/research product for their money) in comparison to what they were 20 years ago (states: wanting to benefit the welfare of the state's population). The issue that professors complain about is that the expectations that come with these new sources of revenue are not aligned with what faculty like to do: research and teach.
All of this is not to say that there aren't other issues that also fall under the &quot;operate like a business&quot; category and that are much less driven by external factors. Among these are administrator salaries, for example, and I think that for that there really is no good reason why they should be as high as they are.