<p>Ignoring the obvious, which is that professorial salaries would have to skyrocket if tenure went away–at least if you wanted to keep quality high–there’s another thing at issue here. One of the reasons why overall production across the professoriate declines slightly after tenure is because of the huge jump in the service load that gets dropped on you the second you get tenure. (Service always seems to be left out of these discussions of faculty workload.) You also lose a lot of other protections on your time that specifically exist to allow pre-tenure faculty to publish. No one can keep up publishing at their previous rate when they are asked to take on quasi-administrative roles that involve endless meetings, budget discussions, etc. R1 research superstars avoid this sort of thing, but for your average LAC professor w/tenure, the service load is really daunting. It is not appropriate or wise to have the heaviest service obligations placed on the pre-tenure faculty, who lack institutional knowledge, among other things, so those faculty with tenure sacrifice their own research time in the name of institutional function/faculty governance.</p>
<p>(Faculty continuity–which would not exist if academia was at-will–is a really valuable thing that benefits students, btw.)</p>