All of what you said is true, but the meaning of tenure is that you are paid a salary by the university and get to keep your job. That's a very generous protect

All of what you said is true, but the meaning of tenure is that you are paid a salary by the university and get to keep your job. That's a very generous protection and it's offered to encourage free discussion and exchange of ideas, which is what the University is all about. There are professors who choose to ditch research and make teaching their calling, even at research universities. Universities are not very well-run when compared to your average fortune 500 corporation, and there is a lot of skullduggery that goes on inside of academic departments, particularly those that do not receive a whole lot of research funding, such as the humanities. The path to tenure is brutal and is full of pitfalls (in fact many positions are explicitly not tenure-track; there are many, many adjunct positions where folks are paid a pittance and forced to sign very unfair contracts that must be renewed periodically). Even with all that being said, academics do enjoy a degree of freedom that those in the corporate world can only dream of.