I am not going to defend the tenure system. It certainly can be modified. If one Googles, one will see that conservatives are more likely than liberals to accept tradition as a reason for continuing with a policy. I don't have any reason to continue it myself IF it isn't serving a good purpose. I do think the concept serves a purpose as Goat points out, sometimes we need research into areas that may not be popular. Tenure allows that. Now maybe it has side effects that make tenure worse than the alternative. If so, we need to change or eliminate it. I'll leave that up to people who actually know.
But as always we are discussing something that isn't the real problem. Someone points out how the people that work in the system may be abusing the system and we all look that way. Meanwhile we ignore the total explosion of administrators and administrator salaries at universities. See story. From that link:
Administrators are not only well staffed, they are also well paid. Vice presidents at the University of Maryland, for example, earn well over $200,000, and deans earn nearly as much. Both groups saw their salaries increase as much as 50 percent between 1998 and 2003, a period of financial retrenchment and sharp tuition increases at the university. The University of Maryland at College Park—which employs six vice presidents, six associate vice presidents, five assistant vice presidents, six assistants to the president, and six assistants to the vice presidents—has long been noted for its bloated and extortionate bureaucracy, but it actually does not seem to be much of an exception. Administrative salaries are on the rise everywhere in the nation. By 2007, the median salary paid to the president of a doctoral degree-granting institution was $325,000. Eighty-one presidents earned more than $500,000, and twelve earned over $1 million. Presidents, at least, might perform important services for their schools. Somewhat more difficult to explain is the fact that by 2010 even some of the ubiquitous and largely interchangeable deanlets and deanlings earned six-figure salaries.
If you have any remaining doubt about where colleges and universities have been spending their increasing tuition and other revenues, consider this: between 1947 and 1995 (the last year for which the relevant data was published), administrative costs increased from barely 9 percent to nearly 15 percent of college and university budgets. More recent data, though not strictly comparable, follows a similar pattern. During this same time period, stated in constant dollars, overall university spending increased 148 percent. Instructional spending increased only 128 percent, 20 points less than the overall rate of spending increase. Administrative spending, though, increased by a whopping 235 percent.
That's a huge problem, Marv
My personal knowledge about that is confined to a single campus, and the views of many emeritus professors from that campus. They are of various political stripes, but they all say the explosion in administrative staff is astounding, soaks up huge chunks of the budget and slows decision making to a crawl. As a consequence, more and more departments are depending on research grants and outside funding to maintain quality faculty. This model encourages more low-level courses to be taught by grad students, many who have no interest in academic careers while the full professors work on grant funded research.