What does "senior and middle positions" mean? Are you talking about something that has the potential to be a tenured position, non-tenured academic positions, or non-academic positions?
Our middle and senior management are increasingly a separate class. It used to be that management was done by established academics on a temporary basis: the department's full professors take their turn as head of department, for example, and the Pro-Vice-Chancellors (deputy Presidents) would have recently been senior profs. Nowadays, heads of department tend to be externally recruited as such, there's an increasing group of senior management that have never been academics, and those that have been are essentially part of a separate management track that doesn't really interact with the career paths of the rest of us.
The traditional governance measures have also broken down: it used to be that the faculty Senate was (probably over-)powerful; now management is corporate-style in the hands of Vice Chancellors-as-CEOs with their senior management colleagues and carefully selected 'independent' non-execs serving as oversight.
That's why I'm quite confident in saying generally "universities are in trouble". I've seen it over time and geography. Not all places of higher learning are. Some private and state entities are thriving. What is killing the universities, in my opinion, is they're caught in a no-mans-land, as neither fully state entities, nor private concerns.
Colleagues in other countries have suggested that "each unhappy university system is unhappy in its own way". Hugely constrained funding in some countries, direct government interference in others, rampant casualisation in a third, a collapse in scholarship in a fourth...
I also knew plenty of more senior professors that left the field, which didn't encourage me to backfill it. Strangely enough, whatever difficulty there may be in the more senior ranks, entry sure seems like a grind.