I don't think he is correct. As with many other things, tenure is a benefit that has a cost: if you want to attract people without offering tenure, you just inc

I don't think he is correct. As with many other things, tenure is a benefit that has a cost: if you want to attract people without offering tenure, you just increase your salaries to compensate for the lack of a permanent employment guarantee. Tenure is worth quite a bit, but as the market for non-tenured research positions show it's not worth Microsoft Research salaries much, and very much within the budget of big universities since they now have the flexibility to fire people and don't have to think of each case of tenure granted as permanent cash flow going out. The thing about academic hiring and academia in general that's interesting is that prestige is highly integrated into every aspect of the industry. It's also highly reliant on foreign labour, as they get an exemption from visa caps that both gives them the ability to hire from a vastly greater labour pool and also makes them attractive as places to work for smart foreigners. A professor position at a prestigious university is still worth a lot just for the prestige alone, tenure or not, as you get access to other prestigious colleagues, a higher quality pool of PhD students, and a sense remaining in the general academic community as a whole (although I guess we'll see if this remains true). I'm not entirely convinced that tenure is a driving factor for faculty hires. It's true that traditionally, tenure-track positions are the "real" research jobs, and non-tenure track positions are where they hire the grunts to do some teaching at really terrible rates, but the reason that they can get away with doing that is because there are vastly more PhDs than there are positions for them, even in competitive STEM fields. This is why tenured positions have been mostly disappearing over the past decade. There's no reason this system has to remain, the tenure-track can just become the full-professor track, and nothing much has to change. In my opinion, this will not have too much of an effect on the academic job market in Texas. The people that cared enough about politics to swear off all jobs in Texas were never really an option (oh no the gender studies department will be empty, what will the Texas politicians think about this tragic development), and the rest are still in the competitive market of academic hires. I think, independent of this whole Texas saga, that the whole notion of academic tenure needed a rework anyways, as it never really made sense to me why specifically research positions have a permanent offer of employment. The whole notion of academic freedom is mostly a load of bullshit, if you don't write the correct things you don't get grants, and if you don't get grants you're effectively fired at big research universities anyways, tenure or not. What's left is a guarantee of employment that causes a great deal of inflexibility in the job market and on the institutions, and causes a great deal of risk aversion. The rework didn't need to come like this, but it'll be interesting to see what comes of it.