[anbende]

I just tried to clarify my position in a post close to this one. Let me add this about tenure. Tenure is meant to protect researchers so they can do the resarch that they want and find most interesting. The idea is to insulate them from the vagaries of others opinions, as it is believed that this type of freedom is good for research. What it is NOT designed to do, and never was, was put tenured professors in a position where they can just not do research. While pressuring researchers to put out a half-dozen mediocre papers a year is probably not a good idea, as it lowers the quality of the field and turns science into a commodity, "less" is not necessarily the solution. In this case the amount that was being produced clearly indicated that research just wasn't getting done. If a researchers job is to do research, then expecting a certain amount of time and effort spent doing that is not unreasonable.

For that reason Higgs just isn't a good example of why the system is broken. The university was upset about his lack of productivity in the 70s, long before the current publishing environment became an issue.