How Not to Lose Your Tenured Position

[Rerun] Over on Faculty Lounge and to some extent on the Caron Tax Blog a discussion has broken out about what to do with all the old (and privileged)  folks in law teaching who are clogging up the system so all the young (and privileged) folks who want to be law teachers have a hard time getting those plum jobs. My view? I'm just happy to observe the intraclass warfare.  As the John Revolting character said to the Christian Slater character in "Broken Arrow" when he set off a small nuclear device, "Ain't it Cool."

In the course of the discussion (I'd link to it but have no idea how to link to a comment) someone made a comment like "Young or old, let's have standards and if people cannot keep up, out they go."  Orin Kerr then writes: "Can you say more about how/if you would do that in a way consistent with tenure protections? Would you say that failure to reach a minimum productivity level is "good cause" to fire a tenured professor, and if so, what kind of standard would you propose? Or would you end tenure protections first?"

 And, right there we have the issue, don't we. I like the ways he phrases it -- "good cause." I think of it as "for cause."  When we think about tenure the running joke is to lose it you have to do something really awful -- kill someone, rob a bank, sexually harass a student,  Simply punching a student is not enough. In fact that gets you a paid vacation. Being a God-awful teacher is not enough; stealing from the school is not enough. In fact, and here is my punch line:

There is nothing connected to actually doing the job or not doing it that can be a basis for dismissal.

Think of this in the context of other jobs. If you delivered mail, you could be fired for punching the boss but never ever for putting the wrong mail in the wrong box. If you were a meat inspector, you could get fired for shop-lifting from WalMart but never ever for simple stamping as OK, rotten meat that then makes 1000 people sick. A physician could be canned for getting drunk and smashing his Porsche into a pedestrian but not for performing an accidental lobotomy.

I'm thinking. What kind of job security is it that says the main thing you can never be fired for is screwing up on the job you are being paid to do?