"Tenure is the one big incentive academia has going for it." I'd have to disagree. I think people pursue careers in academia for a lot of reasons besides job s

"Tenure is the one big incentive academia has going for it." I'd have to disagree. I think people pursue careers in academia for a lot of reasons besides job security. As you point out, there's such an overwhelming surplus of workers in academia that they end up working for very low pay. It's unlikely that removing tenure would deter so many of these people that we'd actually have a scarcity of workers in academia. And I don't really understand why tenure would be so important for people doing controversial research. People do controversial research in all kinds of settings in which there's no tenure.