Scientific American recently published this entertaining guest blog from a tenure insider, Ms Radhika Nagpal, a newly-tenured professor at Harvard. Among other things, she advises young scholars to create a “feelgood” email folder, stay away from your emails on the week-end, and have fun. This is great advice, but doesn’t the tenure system create an academic apartheid (academic “haves” and “have-nots”) and produce perverse incentives (job-security for life)? Shouldn’t tenure be abolished, and if so, what’s the probability of the abolition of tenure ever happening?

(*) Hat tip to Tyler Cowen.