[rscho]

Getting tenure means (ideally) that the system considers you have proven yourself as a competent researcher and therefore accepts to release a bit of pressure on publishing to allow you to pursue more exploratory objectives. It does not mean you're allowed to behave badly and (officially) does not protect oneself from the consequences of such behaviour. Remove tenure and you remove the last bastion of real research we have left in our industrialized and quasi-corporate western research institutions.

Removing tenure would completely trash western science and in practice yield total scientific leadership to eastern powers, who still have old style academic systems with strong tenure positions and less concern for academic mistreatment and "wokeness".

[soco]

Where do you draw the line for tenure? So hitting colleagues with a binder is acceptable, okay got it. How about hitting them with a baseball bat? How much tenure we need for that? Should Einstein be allowed to kill physicists because he's a genius? If we already agreed to make tenure an excuse for doing bad stuff, let's make it official and negotiate the legal borders.

[rscho]

> So hitting colleagues with a binder is acceptable, okay got it

> we already agreed to make tenure an excuse for doing bad stuff

Re-read my above comment. Never said that. I said removing tenure entirely is a very bad idea for the health of western science.

[soco]

Removing tenure is indeed a very bad idea. However I think we're talking about using tenure as a hall pass for whatever asocial attitude some might practice. Because hitting your fellow researchers with a binder doesn't do much to advance science, that's for for sure... it's not like the tenured scientists had all the answers and by being aggressive they actually quench different - and possibly novel - ideas.