> Overlooked Fact: For the remaining 30+ years of your career, you have unbeatable job security, summers without any externally imposed obligations, sabbaticals, and the option to "take a slow year with your research" should you decide to have children, or have a family/personal emergency, or just want to, you know, live life and see the world.
In many (US) universities though, perish or die is still a very valid concern, even when tenured. You get yearly reviews, and if you score a "0" (zero), you can be fired, even from tenure. Futhermore, universities thus value a number of small articles more than a book, because you are supposed to publish continuously all over the place. While you write a book, chances are you don't have time to deal with additional articles (on top of your other obligations).
Add on top of that all the administrative tasks in the department, faculty, university etc. and even a tenured professor doesn't exactly live the easy life.
> You get yearly reviews, and if you score a "0" (zero), you can be fired, even from tenure.
I am not aware of such a thing, and if it were offered to me I would say "That's not really tenure.", but I believe you that some schools do it. Similarly, real [1] tenure does not usually include administrative requirements because those requirements are, in my experience, not mandated by your employment contract. They are mandated by social pressure to be a good university citizen.
> even a tenured professor doesn't exactly live the easy life.
I agree that the typical tenured professor is a hard working busy professional; I just mean to say that in principle tenure could be used to merely teach (holding up the formal obligations of your contract), and I have certainly known people who have chosen that path at one point or another in their lives.
[1] I realize it may seem I am defining-away your point, but I take the definition of tenure to be "You cannot be fired as long as you continue to fulfill the formal requirements of your employment contract, and those formal requirements cannot meaningfully restrict your personal research agenda (academic freedom)."
I'm not sure when you were a professor, but things have changed a lot in the just the past four years. My sister is a professor at a California public university and unless you have a Nobel Prize (or are prominent in some other manner), everyone is being scrutinized. Tenure no longer means a job for life. It means they need to have cause to push you out (no one actually gets fired) -- whereas w/o tenure they needn't have any cause.
Apparently a common tactic is to increase your teaching load so high that no reasonable human can do it. These people either go to a different university or leave academia disgruntled.
Oh, I agree that for some, tenure means they can have an easy life for the rest of their career.
Another problem I see, however, is that tenure can be redefined and is changing depending on subjects. There are subjects where, realistically, your only chance is to either take that one job, whether it offers real tenure or not. The universities of course know that as well and are thus in a position where they can put significantly more into your employment contract than a tenured position would normally entail. If for example the above mentioned grading system would work, then it would get rid of the possibility of "just teaching", however, as can be seen in another reply of mine below to another poster, the grading system is fundamentally flawed.
As an aside: UArk has the above mentioned system of "tenure" in place for all professors
The problem with publish or perish is that it leads to people gaming the system. If pay rises (or employment) solely hinge on the amount of (however graded) publications you have achieved, this leads to people essentually using parts of books they are writing as articles etc. This in turn leads to a doubling of information, inconsistencies etc, alongside the fact that not every topic can be adequately dealt with in a journal article.
The system actively punishes big projects and thoughts in favour of small, more easily digestible (and thus publishable) projects. If a university only looks at the number of publications and not at their nature, they shift from quality to quantity, which in turn is bad, because it fundamentally undermines the purpose of academia.
edit: I just saw _dps also linked to the gamification bit, but the rest holds true nonetheless (and I do agree with him)
I'm not saying that publish or perish is an optimal solution, just that there's nothing special about it. Plenty of people have "file your TPS reports with cover-sheets or perish", but there's not special jargon for it.
Publish or perish is not just about doing your job, rather it limits you in how to do your job, and that limitation runs counter to what your job often requires.
It's not so much "publish" in itself that's the problem[1], it's how publishing is defined and handled, and that a certain form of publishing is seen as right to the detriment of any other form of published material, whereas the preferred method is often not the best method for a given project.
[1]: though it certainly is a big part of the overall problem of uniting teaching, research and publishing
And I think the point that zimbu668 is making, is that such situations are still not unique to academia. Perverse or misaligned incentives are the norm in quite a few industries.
For example, sales guys are compensated based on sticker price, not profit margin, which means that the guy who sells $2MM of work for $1MM (i.e. at a loss) gets more commission than the guy who sells $0.5MM worth of work for $0.75MM. For another example, grading programmers by lines of code... 'nuf said ;). Another totally ubiquitous example: grading office workers by ass-in-seat time rather than value produced. Another also ubiquitous example: Departments in a company encouraged to spend as much money as they can at the end of the quarter, so their next budget doesn't get cut.
I could go on, but I'll stop here. The point is, even if "publish or perish" refers to misaligned incentives, that still means it's basically the same as 90% of other jobs out there.
Alongside the other major problems with publish-or-perish mentioned in other responses, most people's ability to fulfill their job requirements is not decided by a program committee of 30 colleagues from other workplaces looking-over the reviews given by 3-5 anonymous colleagues, but actually written by their grad-students, based on a bare-minimal reading of your actual work.
A software engineer can commit his code when it compiles and/or when the unit-tests pass. An academic might spend months writing and revising a paper, only to be successively told, "Too many examples", "not enough examples", "there's a bug in your proof", "I can't understand this so it must be brilliant", and finally "too long, didn't read". The paper is then not published, and at minimum the academic must revise the paper and resubmit, taking several more months.
After maybe 6 months, the academic might have succeeded in getting one publication out of one project, and he has to be running multiple papers' worth of projects concurrently throughout the whole year to make sure he produces enough papers each year.
The big deal is that journal publications are a by-product of some kinds of research, and not in themselves proof of good work. Unfortunately, it's the dominant mechanistic (I won't use the word "objective") way of evaluating academic job performance. Being mechanistic, it is easily gamed, and the gaming can corrupt the underlying process (e.g. the generation of "publons" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Least_publishable_unit).
Most academics see themselves as being tasked with expanding the frontier of human knowledge, not with documenting it and persuading other people that it's important (which is seen by many as a vulgar popularity and marketing contest, not an intellectual one).
This is pretty deep in the thread, but I'll bite because I have a few counterintuitive ideas I'd like to share. Apologies for the lengthy prose.
> Expanding knowledge without communicating it is useless
Perhaps controversially, I'm not sure I agree with this, at least not on the timescale of a singe person's career. Recording new knowledge is absolutely essential, and many important ideas in science were discovered or rediscovered by reading old personal notes of great scientists that never made it into a letter or article. Not even the most ardent publish-or-perish critics argue that researchers shouldn't record their ideas and findings somehow, and make those recordings available.
But actually communicating the work in the present, rather than merely making it available in a recorded form, requires a willing recipient and a crafted message. So the focus on publication conflates the creation of good ideas with the ability to persuade others (and the readiness of others to be persuaded).
You might say "Sure, that's also true everywhere else". Having been on both sides of the fence, my experience is that it's actually much less true everywhere else, precisely because research is so future-oriented. In most lines of work you are trying to get results today/tomorrow/this-quarter, and, while you always need to persuade in order to advance, you don't have to persuade about hypotheticals beyond your lifetime like "This theorem could become the basis for an entire field of mathematics someday". See, for example, the originally unpublished works of Karush (now at the heart of optimization theory) or Lyapunov (now the basis of much research on nonlinear systems). Both pursued their ideas for love of the ideas, and both were met with indifferent audiences.
Changing the subject slightly, I submit that in many cases journal publications have evolved to be more advertising and less communication, particularly in the most prestigious journals which, for Moore-defying reasons, impose page limits and will not allow you to attach large images, data files, or programs. While not nearly as bad as patent descriptions, journal publications are almost never as useful in reproducing results as simply having the work artifacts of the research process: procedure pages from someone's lab notebook, program source code, raw data files unaltered by "smoothing for visualization", sensor/instrument configurations, the 20 line informal proof that inspired the 20 page formal proof that gets to a journal, etc. These kinds of artifacts are recorded by any researcher in the workaday process of doing research. Assuming basic archiving ability, there is no risk of these ideas being lost to society even in a journal-free world.
But if you don't believe me that journal articles are not isomorphic to shared knowledge, the proof is in the pudding: a fellow researcher will happily share his journal article (advertisement) with you, but ask for a copy of the lab notebook pages and you may be in for a chilly response.
In many (US) universities though, perish or die is still a very valid concern, even when tenured. You get yearly reviews, and if you score a "0" (zero), you can be fired, even from tenure. Futhermore, universities thus value a number of small articles more than a book, because you are supposed to publish continuously all over the place. While you write a book, chances are you don't have time to deal with additional articles (on top of your other obligations).
Add on top of that all the administrative tasks in the department, faculty, university etc. and even a tenured professor doesn't exactly live the easy life.