Ban on Tenure for New Faculty Hires Passes Texas Senate

That's very fair. I'm sorry for being rude and have a great weekend as well.

I don't think he is correct. As with many other things, tenure is a benefit that has a cost: if you want to attract people without offering tenure, you just increase your salaries to compensate for the lack of a permanent employment guarantee. Tenure is worth quite a bit, but as the market for non-tenured research positions show it's not worth Microsoft Research salaries much, and very much within the budget of big universities since they now have the flexibility to fire people and don't have to think of each case of tenure granted as permanent cash flow going out.

The thing about academic hiring and academia in general that's interesting is that prestige is highly integrated into every aspect of the industry. It's also highly reliant on foreign labour, as they get an exemption from visa caps that both gives them the ability to hire from a vastly greater labour pool and also makes them attractive as places to work for smart foreigners. A professor position at a prestigious university is still worth a lot just for the prestige alone, tenure or not, as you get access to other prestigious colleagues, a higher quality pool of PhD students, and a sense remaining in the general academic community as a whole (although I guess we'll see if this remains true).

I'm not entirely convinced that tenure is a driving factor for faculty hires. It's true that traditionally, tenure-track positions are the "real" research jobs, and non-tenure track positions are where they hire the grunts to do some teaching at really terrible rates, but the reason that they can get away with doing that is because there are vastly more PhDs than there are positions for them, even in competitive STEM fields. This is why tenured positions have been mostly disappearing over the past decade. There's no reason this system has to remain, the tenure-track can just become the full-professor track, and nothing much has to change.

In my opinion, this will not have too much of an effect on the academic job market in Texas. The people that cared enough about politics to swear off all jobs in Texas were never really an option (oh no the gender studies department will be empty, what will the Texas politicians think about this tragic development), and the rest are still in the competitive market of academic hires.

I think, independent of this whole Texas saga, that the whole notion of academic tenure needed a rework anyways, as it never really made sense to me why specifically research positions have a permanent offer of employment. The whole notion of academic freedom is mostly a load of bullshit, if you don't write the correct things you don't get grants, and if you don't get grants you're effectively fired at big research universities anyways, tenure or not. What's left is a guarantee of employment that causes a great deal of inflexibility in the job market and on the institutions, and causes a great deal of risk aversion. The rework didn't need to come like this, but it'll be interesting to see what comes of it.

Here in Europe the term tenure is also used, but apparently vastly differently.

Here, "tenure" means you have a permanent position at a university. You can still be fired, but it's quite a hassle involving a lengthy process. Basically, you're guaranteed to stay employed given adequate performance, but your task allotment can still vary a lot. Eg. less publications can lead to less research time and thus more teaching duties. (Such a thing can lead to a spiral of ever-reduced research time, yes).

If performance keeps being under par after task allotment shifts, you may end up in a new role - eg. as manager instead of researcher. Etc. etc. Basically, things have to get quite bad before you're out of a job, but you cannot sit back and hibernate, or you lose your role as a prof.

Anyway, it seems that in the US, this is rather different. Or, at least, the perception of tenure amongst commenters is.

It's pretty much the same. Tenured faculty have a set of prescribed duties, particularly teaching loads. If they have a lot of grants or other duties that they perform, the teaching burden can be lightened, but they can't just decide to not do anything.

When I was in grad school there were professors who were much less active after getting tenure and a full professorship, but this was a fairly competitive school and they worked themselves to the bone to get tenure at a good school. They were obviously burnt out, most left. A few stick around and mostly just perform their teaching duties and some administrative/service work.

The top researchers were often not the best teachers, some of the better teachers had let their foot off the gas on the research side (the university wants them to do research because of how the grant structure works).

My area was computer science and from my personal experience I saw a lot of what you're talking about. These people are hyper competitive and sunk a good chunk of their young adult life in this stuff. It is at that part a big part of their identity. There are easier things to do, it's not like tenure at a state university salary is some big prize for someone who is competitive at a top department--they have the smarts and drive to have much better salary and plenty of job security elsewhere.

I knew plenty of people who were total maniacs after tenure, it made no difference. Lots of people slowed down a little, but only because they were so fried.

Most research I've observed is still safe and boring (IMHO) because it's more likely to land papers and grants. No one uses their tenure to really do anything daring hardly--you can't, you'd fuck your students. They still need publications! So we were all in a never-ending publishing grind. With or without tenure it never ends so long as you still have students and care about their future.