I almost couldn't make it through without going crazy:

>Imagine you ran a restaurant. A very prestigious, exclusive restaurant. To attract top talent, you guarantee all cooks and waiters job security for life. Not only that, because you value honesty and candor, you allow them to say anything they want about you and your cuisine, publicly and without fear of retribution. The only catch is that all cooks or waiters would have to start out as dishwashers or busboys, for at least 10 years, when none of these protections would apply. It sounds absurd in the context of the food-service industry—for both you and your staff.

Except that the reason this is crazy is that dishwashing and bussing tables have little to do with cooking, and that the goal of a restaurant is to make money. A much better example would be one in which the goal of a restaurant is to produce new and exciting foods, and where all head chefs have to start out as a station chef and prove themselves there, first. This system would actually make a lot of sense then.

The article then goes on to blame tenured faculty salaries for increasing costs of tuition; never mind that academic faculty salaries have either just kept up with inflation or fallen behind it for the past 30 years, that in fact administrative salaries have ballooned during that same period, and that the fraction of tenured faculty has dropped substantially. Some of the numbers they give are at first glance highly suspect (35 years of professorship costing $12 million means, not adjusting for inflation or the opportunity cost of money, that a professor costs a little more than 340 thousand dollars a year over her lifespan - a number that seems hard to justify).

The argument about affecting teaching and interdisciplinary study is a red herring - if we put too much weight on (e.g.) publishing as opposed to teaching in deciding whom to give tenure, there's no reason we won't do so when we're hiring for our renewable 7-year contracts or whatever alternative system is implemented. The problem is academic priorities, not tenure. (Though I'm not taking a stand on whether or not teaching is valued too much or too little as it is, and likewise with interdisciplinary studies).

The arguments that tenure hurts intellectual freedom for those without it is ok, but it also misses the point of tenure. Tenure makes it difficult for political decisions to dictate research directions. Tenured medical ethicists can write honestly about abortion without worrying that in 10 years the social tides may have shifted and they suddenly have to defend their jobs because of something a TV news pundit dug up on them. The article is somewhat correct in that young researchers might be afraid of saying inflammatory things because it could hurt their chances of getting tenure later, but there's no reason any alternative system is necessarily better in this regard.

>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.

This is particularly infuriating. The article makes it seem as though Taylor is an academic faculty member, so it baffles me that he doesn't know any better. Teaching even one course is a pretty substantial amount of work. Doing it while trying to get grants and do research requires a tremendous amount of effort. The professor's I've known are, to a person, among the most dedicated and hardworking people I've ever met.

>But the clincher for the anti-tenure argument may come from the very people it is supposed to benefit: academics. Specifically, young academics. Consider the career path of an aspiring full-time tenured professor: Four years of college, six years getting a doctorate, four to six years as a post-doc, and then six years on the tenure track. 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 perhaps my favorite paragraph in the article, and it by itself might be enough to justify some of the proposed fixes. The alternatives to the current system, the "modifications to tenure", are all interesting ideas that I'd like to see explored more fully. I wish that there were more to them than a few throwaway sentences in the second-to-last paragraph of the article.