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Comment by maxbRuns | Hacker News Reader

I agree. In my mind, one of the cultural changes that we need is for universities to abandon the tenure system. I think if that happened, there'd be more hiring of new professors, so there would be more of an incentive for academics to maintain a strong reputation in their field.

Academic versions of github might arise, as ways for researchers to show their prospective employers what they can do.

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Tenure is the one big incentive academia has going for it. Un-tenured academics work like dogs for peanuts (given their skill sets) to get tenure. You take that away, and it becomes "work like a dog for peanuts your entire career". Who's going to take that deal without the carrot of "do what interests you without fearing for your job security" at the end of the tunnel?

Streams of irrelevant publications are only going to get worse when "publish or perish" extends to your entire career.

(Not to mention that tenure is a good idea for, say, climate change researchers, or people doing potentially provocative demographic research, or stem-cell researchers, or anyone else someone influential somehwere might want to see silenced)

"Tenure is the one big incentive academia has going for it."

I'd have to disagree. I think people pursue careers in academia for a lot of reasons besides job security. As you point out, there's such an overwhelming surplus of workers in academia that they end up working for very low pay. It's unlikely that removing tenure would deter so many of these people that we'd actually have a scarcity of workers in academia.

And I don't really understand why tenure would be so important for people doing controversial research. People do controversial research in all kinds of settings in which there's no tenure.

I doubt that removing tenure would result in the hiring of new professors. One recent trend has been to hire adjuncts as much as possible and to only slowly hire tenured faculty. Let's suppose that you have a professor (say a theorist) who works on a few ideas--but deep ones--she can take her time and focus on them instead of worrying about losing her job because she hasn't produced recently (funding is another story). Similarly, if she does something controversial--then again, her job is safe.

The incentive for most academics (say science/engineering) to maintain a strong reputation is personal. I do research because: 1) I want to know the answer to a question 2) I'm selfish and I want to know the answer first ;>

This leads me to putting in 100 hr weeks (sometimes you have to grind it out--other times, you have to step back and work less to be more creative) at times and being rather productive. Do you really think that fear of termination would result in the same output? Do you think that the average institution could pay researchers to put in the hours that they do--weekends, holidays, evenings, etc.?

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