Two ethical justifications of tenure are, (1) a consequentialist one, to give people an incentive to take the risks and make the sacrifices to get a tenured job, because we think it is socially usefdully taht there by PhD educated university professors, and (2) a desert-based one, to protect people who have made these sacrifices and put themselves in a position where, as Yoshie remarks, many of them are essentially unemployable in anything else, a sort of seniority system.
Thatcher abolished tenure in the Brit university system, I believe. Is anyone aware of studies of the consequences? I would expect that a result would be that the number and (though this is hard to measure) quality of peoiple undertakinag academic careers would drip, there would be brain drain by more successful people, and the value of the reserach and teaching at the affected universities would drop.
Yoshie says:
>Ph.D. programs in the humanities don't give you any economic benefit
>_unless_ you have a good fortune of landing a tenure-track job _and_
>getting tenured. If you don't, economically speaking, your graduate
>years are negatives, not positives (though there still remains
>intellectual satisfaction): you are older (in your 30s or sometimes
>40s); . .. . .
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