Tenure improves teaching, for those who have it

In reading this very eloquent account of how tenure helps professors become better, more expansive teachers http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/2010/08/tenure-and-teaching.html

I was struck with how few faculty actually have the opportunities described in this piece.

Tenure allows teachers, first of all, to read far beyond their specialization and to thereby develop complex connections between historical periods and texts. Only with tenure does it feel safe to devote the long stretches of time it takes to read and understand Hegel or Descartes in detail. When you are struggling to justify yourself every other semester to the administrative apparatus, you would never dare take up the challenge of a new field. I could never have explored Renaissance architecture before having tenure. Only when you believe you have the time, can you stop and think.

But this ability to calmly ponder is become more and more an exclusive luxury. Far too many colleagues are worried about their next review to undertake a new research project that might not generate an article for a year or three. Even with tenure, I constantly feel the pressure of "What have you done lately?" It is far more oppressive for the rest of academia than it is for us senior fellows. You need quite a thick skin, or the protective haze of professorial forgetfulness, to shield yourself from the many intrusions on your research.

That having been said, check out the "I cite" link above.