I admit I got a chuckle from Richard Posner's recommendations to Harvard in the wake of the Larry Summers resignation:

5. The anachronistic institution of tenure should be reexamined and perhaps jettisoned. The market for university professors is highly competitive; a good person whose contract is not renewed can get a comparable job elsewhere...

6. A generous buy-out program should be instituted in order to encourage early retirement and thus provide greater career opportunities for young academics.

If the suggested measures precipitated some, even many, resignations of faculty, the quitters could easily be replaced with individuals of equal or higher quality.

I happen to think life tenure is one of the worst features of academia, an egregiously counter-market policy that has any number of negative side effects. (No surprise that Posner, ever the advocate of policy-setting through market action, would think this way.)

Of course, Posner doesn't pause to consider whether maybe his arguments would also apply to Article III judges...?

Posner's full critique of the tenure model includes his prediction that it will die off:

I do not think tenure makes a great deal of sense any longer in the academic setting, and I expect to see it gradually abandoned (It has already been abandoned in England, for example.) If a university wishes to offer its faculty protection against political retaliation for unpopular views, it can do that by writing into the employment contract that politics is an impermissible ground for termination...

Tenure removes the stick but not necessarily the carrot...

The greater cost of tenure is simply in forcing retention of inferior employees.

27 Feb 06