Does tenure really make the best professors? In my experience it only creates an incentive up to the point of getting tenure, then most of them hibernate until retirement and take up space without producing much because they have no need to. IMO a good professor is great even without tenure. If they are just trying to fake it til tenure pushing cheap research to then have them take up a slot and resources to sit around, I rather ban tenure.
Here in Europe the term tenure is also used, but apparently vastly differently.
Here, "tenure" means you have a permanent position at a university. You can still be fired, but it's quite a hassle involving a lengthy process. Basically, you're guaranteed to stay employed given adequate performance, but your task allotment can still vary a lot. Eg. less publications can lead to less research time and thus more teaching duties. (Such a thing can lead to a spiral of ever-reduced research time, yes).
If performance keeps being under par after task allotment shifts, you may end up in a new role - eg. as manager instead of researcher. Etc. etc. Basically, things have to get quite bad before you're out of a job, but you cannot sit back and hibernate, or you lose your role as a prof.
Anyway, it seems that in the US, this is rather different. Or, at least, the perception of tenure amongst commenters is.
It's pretty much the same. Tenured faculty have a set of prescribed duties, particularly teaching loads. If they have a lot of grants or other duties that they perform, the teaching burden can be lightened, but they can't just decide to not do anything.
When I was in grad school there were professors who were much less active after getting tenure and a full professorship, but this was a fairly competitive school and they worked themselves to the bone to get tenure at a good school. They were obviously burnt out, most left. A few stick around and mostly just perform their teaching duties and some administrative/service work.
The top researchers were often not the best teachers, some of the better teachers had let their foot off the gas on the research side (the university wants them to do research because of how the grant structure works).
I think you could have more non-tenure track faculty, but eliminating it entirely is a bad ideas unless you are willing to compete on price for top researchers, which colleges are largely opposed to doing.
The up-shot is faculty are going to look elsewhere for jobs.
Once you get tenure you still need to make full professor. The bar there is that you have to have made a name for yourself, and that doesn’t happen if you hibernate.
