Running a research lab at a university is a lot like running a startup. I believe the professors should get to enjoy the fruits of being successful early in their career later on after being tenured. Otherwise there would be no incentive for these guys to make the personal sacrifices required to do great work above and beyond what an 8-5er might do.
It seems like a half way decent financial model and an intelligent management of investments should be able to continue to make a system like this successful. The current focus on tenure as the problem is more of a reaction to poor financial planning by the endowment managers IMO.
In sports the ultimate prevention against doping (if someone wanted to prevent such a thing) would be to test frozen samples every year for say 20 years with progressively more modern technology and threaten to retroactively remove trophies or awards of those discovered to be clever cheaters. I wonder if there is a similar analog for financial institution managers where one would place their compensation in reserve and only dole it out based upon proper risk management behavior (as well as returns) as proven out by future events.