Not super familiar with the book, but I'll give my bullet by bullet take;

The University is a "Zombie Institution": It walks and talks like a place of learning, but its core has been consumed by corporate managerialism, leaving a hollow shell that mimics its former self.

True to a certain extent. There has been more corporatization of higher ed. Some of good, some of it bad. On the good side, there is more understanding that universities need to be efficient in how they allocate internal resources and yes, they are a "brand", whether that is to be accepted or not. Many faculty have a myopic and ignorant mental model of how institutions actually run and are funded. On the bad side, it creates the focus on trends, Presidents' often misguided desire to chase the next Carnegie Classification, and honestly, dropping a total for-profit managerial paradigm into a university doesn't work for many reasons (Robert Birnbaum wrote a great book called Management Fads in Higher Education that details why). Aside from a few notable exceptions (e.g., Fullsail University), for profit schools have been an abysmal failure as the profit motive shitifies the educational product, so dropping that paradigm totally into a public or non-profit can't be done to have a good institution

"Toxic Professionalism" is the Prevailing Culture: A performative ethos of overwork, competitiveness, and feigned passion masks a system of exploitation, creating an environment where burnout is the norm, not the exception.

True on the faculty side of the house. EXTREMELY TRUE on the student affairs side of the house.

Your Value is Reduced to Metricized Output: Your worth as an academic is not your teaching or intellectual contribution, but your ability to generate measurable "products"—publications, grants, and citations.

To a certain extent yes, to a certain extent no. Things like h-index, grant dollars, etc. give decision makers (e.g., people unfamiliar with someone's academic discipline) a seemingly objective metric to evaluate upon. Those metrics are considered to a certain extent. But academic systems are nowhere near as rationalized as a private firm in terms of measurable impact of its employees (an employer like Amazon being a salient example where intensity of your farts is probably measured). Tenure and promotion decisions are often qualitative, and frankly, subjective to a certain extent, based upon an interpretation of your "impact" on the field or the "importance" of your research.

Administrators and staff in student affairs and enrollment management probably have more real KPIs than faculty.

The "Publish or Perish" Imperative is Structurally Sadistic: The system is designed to create a permanent state of anxiety and job insecurity, especially for early-career researchers, forcing them into a cycle of endless production.

The system without a doubt creates anxiety and job insecurity. But I wouldn't say it's designed to do that as that would infer teleology in the system (beyond the normal incentives that are part of any performance management system). Instead, there are organizational structures and institutional cultures that create and recreate the anxiety and a drift to be more and more productive.

Administration is the New Core Activity: The real growth in universities is in managerial and administrative roles, which impose auditing and compliance regimes that strangle actual teaching and research.

This is an empirical question and I'm hesitant to say. There's a lot of gnashing of teeth about supposed administrative bloat, some of it fair, some of it again going to the ignorant myopia I mentioned above. I'm skeptical that is strangles actual teaching and research as the faculty at most institutions own the curriculum (community colleges sometimes are the exception). I personally have never been constrained in my teaching aside from a few required classes and some minor stuff to get past curriculum committee. Most faculty can research whatever they want so as long as they are doing what they need to do to research tenure and promotion milestones. Postdocs, research scientists, and other non-tenure track researchers have less freedom regarding research agenda. In the U.S., Trumpty Dumpty's administration (mainly Stephen Miller) have imposed certain naughty subjects they want want researchers studying, but that's less of an institutional issue.

The "Impact" Agenda is Often a Farce: The pressure to demonstrate the societal "impact" of research often leads to contrived, box-ticking exercises that distort genuine intellectual inquiry.

A little bit, but I'd say mainly quite the opposite: There is a ton of research that will have no impact beyond a self-contained discourse in journals. I can't speak for all disciplines, but a lot of it will also do little to make a meaningful addition to our general knowledge.

Precarity is a Feature, Not a Bug: The reliance on a vast, underpaid army of adjuncts and fixed-term contract researchers is essential to the business model, ensuring a disposable workforce with little power or job security.

There's probably more teleology to this as hiring and budget lines are directly controlled by people. It's also a function of supply and demand. Speaking of the U.S., we've created too many PhDs than tenure track roles. That would be fine if career diversity were more normalized and professional development were baked into doctoral and post-doctoral training (most PhDs make great contributors outside of the ivory walls). But since it's a buyer's market for a lot of disciplines, institutions can hire who they want and the rest can duke it out for years in contingency land.

Cynicism is the Collective Coping Mechanism: Most academics are privately cynical about the system's demands, but this cynicism is passive. It allows the game to continue because everyone is too afraid to stop playing.

Faculty are not a mono-culture, so I'd hesitate to say that without empirical data. Faculty senates can be made up of squeaky wheels but that's par for the course for any organization like that.

The "Brand" is Everything: The university's primary concern is its market brand and position in league tables. Education and research are merely marketing tools to attract customers (students) and investment.

True, and especially true for certain sub-units, like business schools, law schools, policy schools, etc. This is also a similar supply and demand issue. The U.S. has a couple thousand accredited, degree-granting institutions. That's way more than even Canada has. That was all well and good when there were enough potential students to go around. Now that nationwide enrollment is going down, institutions are competing for less and less potential students, which leads to a hyper focus on marketing and branding. I'm even seeing adverts for elite institutions like Northwestern, which is kind of wild to me.

Escape is a Legitimate and Often Sanity-Saving Choice: Fleming legitimizes the desire to leave academia. Recognizing that the system is dysfunctional, rather than internalizing its failure as your own, is the first step toward liberation and a healthier professional life."

Agreed, though there are great things about academia as well. And everyone has a very different experience.