Bret Devereaux

If tenure is going to be rendered meaningless by boards of Governors and craven administrators, then what's the incentive for faculty to stay in academia? It certainly can't be the pay or the work-life balance

Everyone says "there's more service after tenure." Not if tenure becomes meaningless! Because I will fuck right off out of the academy into some other profession, and I imagine I'm not alone

That's the social contract. I bust my ass round the clock for 9 months of the year in an unaffordable city so I can work on my own research undisturbed for the other 3 with some measure of long-term job security. If that goes away, what reason do I have to give up so much labor?

And the grim answer is that we'll keep doing it for the same reason we do so much other unpaid labor: we're competing for the scarce respect of other colleagues in the field. We could all negotiate a much better deal if we toned down our own dog-eat-dog status competition.