A common misconception about academic life is that once a professor has tenure, they can simply coast and have no incentive to do otherwise.
This might be true if salaries were guaranteed for 12 months. They rarely are. For example, the UW pays 2/3 of my salary. I raise the other 1/3 on grant funding, or I don't get paid.
So when I write a multiyear grant, I may have a year's salary riding on a proposal where to be funded I have to be ranked above 90% of other, similarly motivated faculty.
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totally. what baffles me is how this doesn't also result in faculty unions being the most radical unions in academia. every part of being a professor seems shrouded in bullshit that is actually a labor issue. soft money, institutional grant overhead, shitty administrators, broken systems, and so on. you'd think an exceptionally highly motivated group of ppl that do have pretty strong protections against being fired would use that to fight against the bullshit that makes their jobs suck, in the process pushing back the corporatization of the rest of the institutions that harms the rest of the students and workers.
