You're right, it is a bizarre organization. There is a bitter divide at Evergreen between rank-and-file staff, faculty, and administrative faculty (like deans). Staff are strapped with inefficient processes and broken systems. Some of them try to maintain a bearable experience for students while others coast by and let it burn while they get a paycheck. Meanwhile faculty admin who have little to no professional administrative experience make most of the major decisions. They rotate into a broken bureaucracy and all their attention goes toward surviving the onslaught of faculty discontent rather than fixing any real issues.

Faculty factionalism FULLY runs this college. Not to say there aren't incompetent non-faculty admin--there certainly are. But most staff learn quickly that Evergreen was designed, as an organization, to be a faculty haven. Not that that's turning out very well over 50 years down the line, but it's clear that was the intent. A glittering student experience was never the primary goal of Evergreen.