(Academic tenure is) an unconscionably easy way to make a living, a soft touch, as they used to say. Working under conditions of complete freedom, having to show up in the classroom an impressively small number of hours each week, with the remainder of one’s time chiefly left to cultivate one’s own intellectual garden, at a job from which one could never be fired and which (if one adds up the capacious vacation time) amounted to fewe — Joseph Epstein