Instead of raising the standards of hiring, tenure, & promotion in a vain attempt at "professionalism" in the face of increasing proletarianization (part-time faculty, full-time faculty hired on the contract basis, "post-tenure reviews," outright abolition of tenure, etc.), tenured professors should have been mounting a vigorous defense of higher education & public funding for it, creating full-time jobs for which there has existed a measurably increasing need, both on the supply & demand sides (the glut of Ph.D.s & increasing enrollment of undergraduates).
What is tenure for, if not for the protection of political freedom of tenured professors? Why not use it while they still have it?
Every class I teach comes with a _long_ waiting list, often much longer than the list of students enrolled in it, and this despite the fact that many of the courses I teach (Intro to the Humanities, Intro to Fiction, etc.) have doubled their respective class sizes over the last decade or so. Students often complain of large classes & bottleneck courses that lengthen "time to degrees." Surely there is a need for more full-time college teachers; what is lacking is a political will to gain state funding for them.
And there would be even more undergraduates if higher education were free & employed "open admission" as it should!
While Kelley recommends cutting corners to reduce work time, I'd rather have smaller classes -- say, 10-15 students instead of 24 in a composition course, 24 students instead of 45 in an "Intro to X" course. With smaller classes & more full-time teachers, both students & teachers will be happier.
Yoshie