As a result, it has turned academe into an inward-looking club where, despite platitudes to the contrary in recent years, neither teaching nor contact with the real world is rewarded. Ineffective professors can spend decades delivering the same mediocre lectures. Imagine what B-school profs pondering a case study would say about a company with that policy. While there are thousands of wonderful tenured teachers across the country, the system's weaknesses aren't hypothetical. In core courses at some top schools, such as Stanford and Indiana, MBAs complain of professors who seem to be hardly interested in what they're teaching.
Cost is an issue, too.
Costs will increase as government support continues to wither and globalization and technology efforts require major investments. Tenure, meanwhile, forces schools into decades-long commitments that burden budgets. Contracts of, say, five to 10 years. Students and deans could join professors on the committees that decide who gets a contract. That would ensure accountability while preventing deans from remaking a faculty for political reasons.