Is it just academic freedom, because occasionally you’d hear universities saying it’s hard to terminate professors who’ve done academic or sexual misconduct because they have tenure.
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Having tenure means that the professor can only be fired for good cause. Even if the university does think it has good cause, it needs to have evidence to prove it and follow a fair procedure, or the professor can sue the university if they don’t do that. So it can be complicated and take a while even if it will succeed in the end.
Most teaching staff has contracts that expire and need to be renewed, so a simple way for the university to get rid of someone they don’t like is not to renew their contract. They don’t need a good reason for that, and there’s little the employee can do to argue against it.
The principle of academic freedom applies to both groups. But non-tenured professors can’t do much if their contracts are not renewed for a bad (but never explicitly stated) reason like the university doesn’t like their academic work, so they aren’t as protected in practice.
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