>Critics say that tenure hurts students by making professors lazy. Course loads vary widely from school to school: At some public universities, professors teach nine or 10 courses. At smaller schools, they teach as few as one or two, totaling as few as 140 classroom hours a year. If you can't be fired, what's to stop you from refusing to teach an extra course? "I honestly don't know what a lot of academics do a lot of the time," says Taylor.

As a child of two senior academics who are fairly well known in their fields at one of the best Universities in the USA, I do know what a lot of academics do a lot of the time. Just because they are not teaching 10 courses does not mean they are wasting their time or spending it at leisure: my parents often work 10-12 hour days all year long, mainly working on their research (a course that has already been developed and taught several times is not much extra work for a professor, assuming they have TA help or the like; see note at the bottom). Although it is certainly a flexible schedule, it is not an easy one: if you intend to continue doing good work and are not slacking off after tenure, there is no obvious point where you are 'done'. There are always new problems to address, writing to polish, or another conference to attend.

Note on teaching: Although teaching a class for the first time is a huge amount of work, as you need to come up with lectures/etc., teaching it -again- with no changes requires much less time; maybe an hour or two of prep for an hour of classroom time compared to 4+ hours:1 in class. Either way, teaching 9 or 10 -different- courses seems ludicrous if you care about undergraduate teaching quality; even if you are actually teaching two courses 5 times, that leaves no time for research.

>By the time you come up for tenure, you're 40. For men, the timeline is inconvenient. But for women who want to have children, it's just about unworkable.

This is certainly the case. I was born when my parents were in their late 30s, and my younger sister in their mid 40s. Not only are you looking at challenges in terms of stability, but also in terms of just physical location: academic jobs are few and far between, so when one of you can get a job at Ivy League A and the other at Flagship State School B, you take what you get, even if it means that you will be three states away from your spouse. I was born as soon as my parents were able to live in the same place.

Tenure has its disadvantages: in the case of schools which are simply emulating the much better institutions that world class research does flow out of, tenure seems (to me, at least) less important. It does have an impact on undergraduate teaching quality; this is why I believe that teaching staff as well as research staff are so important to the success of a university. Teaching comes as a second responsibility after research to most professors, particularly undergraduate teaching.

The system proposed by nagrom, with divisions between teaching, administration, and research, makes some sense, and from what I've seen it's already partly in place. Any professor who ends up doing administrative work (chairing a department, running a graduate program, etc.) often receives a teaching cut in order to facilitate that. However, the only way that I see to balance the teaching and research is to have dedicated teaching staff who are evaluated primarily on the merits of their teaching.