

Tenure in a Nutshell - billswift
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/07/tenure-in-a-nutshell/60453/

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_delirium
It's not quite the case that there's no pressure or evaluation post-tenure, at
least at big research universities. It's common for a proportion of a
professor's salary to be "soft money" that they have to pay themselves out of
grants--- at the very least summer salary (i.e. 25% of full-year pay) is
almost always paid out of grants, and increasingly a portion of 9-month salary
is as well. So a professor is constantly selling their work not to tenure
committees, but to grant agencies, and if they stop doing so, their pay gets a
huge chop. They might also end up with more teaching load, depending on the
university, since some universities assign more courses per semester to
professors deemed "not research-active" (and if they really want them out,
will start doing things like giving them shitty committee assignments,
withholding annual cost-of-living pay adjustments, moving them to bad offices,
etc.).

More to the point, if we were to abolish tenure, I think we'd also have to
reform how academics are evaluated. The current methods focus almost
exclusively on some combination of publication count and citation count,
driving a strong "publish or perish" CV-line-counting culture. A main
advantage of tenure is that it opens up some breathing space for more senior
academics to take risks on longer-term projects that may or may not pan out,
and won't be producing the usual flurry of papers in the early stages.

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billswift
They obviously didn't intend it that way, but the _pro-tenure_ arguments in
the comments are among the best evidence _against_ tenure around.

