What is tenure, and why is it a thing? Is it different for other jobs?
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Tenure is basically a job guarantee that makes it *really* hard to fire someone – typically, someone with tenure can only be fired for cause (such as inappropriate behavior, or neglecting to fulfill their job’s duties), or for other uncommon reasons like if their department is closed down. Basically, as long as they’re doing their job, it’s almost impossible to fire them.
This exists mostly in the academic world, and it’s mostly there for two reasons. The first is “academic freedom,” the idea that a professor should be free to research, teach, and publish without fear of reprisal. Without academic freedom, a professor is always at the whims of their university – researching a politically charged topic may be discouraged, discoveries that may challenge some conventional wisdom or some currently-taught truth might be shut down, etc. So long as academics can research, study, and publish on *any* topic, our knowledge is never held back – the truth of their claims will always be subject to the scrutiny of their peers, but it can’t be shut down or silenced unfairly by the university itself.
And the other reason is plain ol’ job security. Universities generally just can’t pay what the public sector pays – a top-tier chemist for example, would likely make more money working for a pharmaceutical or military company than for a university. So the tradeoff is job security – you might earn less, but your job is guaranteed, so you’re not worried about having to find a new job after this project, or making your CEO happy to earn that promotion. Without that job security, the top minds in every field would be working privately, instead of passing on their knowledge to the next generation.
That’s not to say there aren’t problems with the tenure system – there are plenty of legitimate issues that people tend to bring up that you can research. But the central tenets are there for those reasons, for good or bad.
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