That is essentially what many people want, yes. There is of course a rather obvious political component to this as well, mentioned in a recent op-ed in the NYT.
Why should universities guarantee jobs to a bunch of elitists who study esoteric subjects and brainwash students with left-wing politics? This critique of tenure in higher education is as old as tenure itself, and it’s gaining ground. In recent years, governing boards and legislators in several states have attempted to ban tenure or curtail its power — sometimes succeeding, as in Wisconsin…
Over the years, tenure’s defenders have offered up noble pleas for the system… All these arguments are basically right. But they will never persuade tenure skeptics outside the university. That’s because the fight over tenure is not really about tenure. It’s a proxy for a larger debate about the meaning of academic freedom and the priorities of higher education…
For all the fashionable talk about innovation in higher education, most administrators are deeply risk-averse in a way that undermines one of the central purposes of the modern university: to provide a space for energetic debate.
When conservatives complain about the lack of intellectually diverse debate on campus, they have a point. But the primary cause is not the predominance of tenured radicals in faculty positions. The problem is administrators’ terror of any controversy, any negative media attention, any headline that could irritate a donor.
While administrators’ anxiety over their institutions’ reputations is an old theme, the rise of social media has led them to “overestimate how angry people are based on that feedback,” Mr. Steinbaugh said. “Twenty years ago, if someone was aggrieved about a Marxist professor on campus, the university might get a number of letters. But now the university says, ‘We’re getting a whole bunch of tweets and emails, so we should do something about it.’”
There is more ideological diversity on most campuses than casual observers realize, but it remains hidden because students, professors and other staff members have internalized this fear of conflict and retaliation. If university leaders would hang back more often from the temptation to act, to issue a public statement every time someone on campus got outraged at someone else, that would go a long way to protecting the academic freedom of everyone, tenured or not.