A not-really-enigmatic comment seen at Confessions of a Community College Dean:

Let me tell you how I lost 6 weeks of my life last year, as an untenured member trying to work collegially with tenured members who think that tenure means they can abuse the rules, push people around, and ignore the needs of curriculum, campus etc.

Starts me musing. Musing-deaf readers may move along.

The classic academic life-strategy embodies a certain economic contract: The applicant is expected to voluntarily postpone economic and social gratification and join the Program — which is accompanied by oppressive and sometimes demeaning demands, occasional hazing and a state of effective indenture (but also by the inevitable excitement of the life of the mind, the security afforded by the culture’s safety blanket, and the glimmer of a real shot at the end) — over the entire period of graduate school, postdockery, adjuncthood and non-tenure-tracking in exchange for the chance to get tenure later in life.

Now in all fairness I should point out that this is not everybody’s experience everywhere (for instance it’s not mine, here and now), but it is at least a shared folkloric image of academic life, and forms the basis of many an amusing Webcomic, personal academic blog, and murder mystery.

First, there are an increasing number of us who really don’t want the tenure, let alone the postdockery &c. What you want us to do? Pay anyway? I don’t think so, Boyo [statistically speaking, scant faculty members in my field(s) would warrant "Girly" in that sentence.].

Second: attrition? How many have fallen by the wayside. Does their absence lead to a diminished and therefore limiting supply of applicants? Heh. Right. This is a functional, mature, and apparently stable pyramid scheme; there will for the foreseeable future always be enough young people willing to do anything to get a job in academia.

[more in a bit]