My wife is in academia. Although, not in the ivory towers. She's at a community college in California, and she's both on the tenured faculty track and administration as a program director. So, her experiences may not speak entirely to this article.

There are lots of problems inherent with academia that most people thinking about this field are not really thinking about. The biggest problem, I think, is that for most 99% of all professors, once they are tenured, they are LOCKED down geographically. And, that sucks. My wife and I have one foot out the door all the time. We go where the jobs are. But, now that she's on the tenure track, we wonder if this is where we'll lay down and die. It's pretty sad, when I think about it. You hear about it time and time again from so much of these guys. One of my old math professors had a page devoted to this. He complained a lot about living in Hawaii and how his wife divorced him because of it. He had a page up here:

http://www.math.hawaii.edu/~lee/

But, apparently, after some time he decided to take down the more controversial stuff. The index.html page to his ramblings are down. Anyways, that's a huge problem for academics. And, I thought about it, and I think the biggest problem is the whole tenure thing. I think it should be abolished. Professors should be able to move to new institutions without worrying about that entire process, and they should be paid a better wage because of it. It should be like any other free market enterprise we have nowadays. And, Universities should also be able to get rid of dead weight. I've had some professors in the past who just gave up on research and life. For example, said professor mentioned above. He gave up on math research because the University kept screwing them over on pay. He retired with only 17 publications under his name. My other friend who is now a tenured math professor at a 4 year college has 17 publications at just 37 years of age. My other friend who has been teaching for about 10 years now has only 2 publications: his math Ph.D. dissertation, and a one page paper that probably isn't worth the paper it's printed on. Anyways, I think it's high time tenure is made obsolete. It gives professors more latitude to move, probably better pay, and more incentive to do research or teach better. It also gives schools and students the opportunity to get better teachers and lose the dead weight.