[BearGoesChirp]

>When you become a tenured professor, the amount of work you do is far less than the vast majority of other jobs with a similar salary.

I think you are mixing up the amount of work a tenured professor has to do with the amount of work they do do.

A tenured professor has to do very little. The idea (even if not the reality) is that a tenured professor has proven themselves enough that the one employing them is willing to ease back any rules so the professor can do science like they want to.

The end result should be (and I think is, but I don't have any hard data at the moment) is that tenured professor do a far larger amount of work than they have to, and are comparable if not even greater than other professions with similar salaries. In large part because they are doing what they love.

Consider a programmer who loves programming and does it at home and at work. A professor is similar, except since they get to pick the topic they work on (to some extent), they are working on the same project both at home and at work.

The last tenured professor I worked under put in a lot more than 40 hours, and he was high up enough to not have any classes to teach (I think he periodically taught a grad class, but it wasn't ever semester).