The biggest problem I find is that universities avoid free market forces by bundling everything together. Tenure is only one part of this.

Students pay tuition that is only dependent on the number of hours they take regardless of what type of course. An industrial technology major has roughly the same tuition as an english major. Students are also shielded from the costs of the system by scholarships, loans, and parents money. They are thus less motivated, less concerned about university waste, and burdening other people with these costs or burdening their own future through debt. Additionally their unmotivated, uninformed choices are putting them behind the educational steering wheel of tax payers' and society's money. It's no surprise that people complain about the lack of funding for science and emphasis on college sports. Those are the choices students have made with OPM (other people's money).

Similarly, faculty are paid for their experience and not subject area. An exception at one university I know: the faculty in one department gamed the system by rotating several people in and out of the department head position so that they each could gain and keep a higher salary when they returned to their non-department head position. Being paid the same leads to some departments having overpaid professors who wish to protect their jobs from the hordes of graduate students by raising as many artificial barriers as they can(tenure, excessive grad student burdens, etc). Other departments may have underpaid, overworked professors who are preparing students for relevant and highly paid positions in the workforce, but who are nevertheless given the same salary as the overpaid professors.

Students are not given the choice of paying less for courses that are taught by an instructor vs by a professor. It would be nice if colleges offered something like that following:

$600 for a course taught by a tenured professor

$300 an instructor

$150 by a teaching assistant

$50 self-taught with exams at a university or third party testing center

Such an unbundled tuition package would quickly expose the inefficiencies of the university system.

Tenure works in a similar way by bundling the good and bad professors together so that they must be accepted as a package deal, much like the way unions work. I think most tenured professors are decent teachers and the truly bad ones are exceptions, but the lack of flexibility to hire cheaper instructors where there is a demand and the lack of choice for students is the real problem. Even if a department had all really good tenured professors and no instructors or non-tenured staff, the costs to students would be too expensive.

Similar to the above bundling, state government jobs often require a Bachelors degree...any major...for positions that should only require a HS diploma. This is especially bad for non-teaching staff jobs at universities which require a college degree(any major) for many jobs that only require a HS diploma...part of the universities' way of promoting their own.

The whole system is designed to shield participants from free market forces by bundling everything together and offering consumers and tax payers one bundled choice.

The university system has not changed despite increased information availability provided by the internet and online ordering of books. Most of the actual learning is done outside the classroom and verified by in-class tests. Surely a better system is available in this information age.

Full disclosure: I do tech support at a university. When I see the outrageous salaries that some professors make, tenured or not, sometimes it is infuriating. Especially when they don't understand the basics of using a computer.