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Notes -
What about banning tenure but also banning firing people for spurious reasons like mean tweets or not being a hyper-leftist?
In academic circles there's a real prestige that comes with the word "tenured". I think getting that distinction lets professors "relax" in a very important sense. Most really smart researchers in math and physics just want to be left alone to do their research, they want to be insulated from the practicalities of real life to just have space to think, and tenure provides that in a way that your suggestion doesn't really. You don't have to worry that you won't be able to eat if you don't publish a set number of papers or appear well on whatever citation metric, so you can do a bit more pie-in-the-sky thinking than you could without tenure. Though this is probably less true in fields that require lots and lots of grant proposals and lots of actual equipment, but for the theory-heavy fields tenure is really important.
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