Tenure Portability

Let’s suppose you have tenure at one institution when you are offered a lucrative position at another. You will not, however, be able to take your tenure with you but will have to reapply at your new institution after two years. Do you take the offer or insist on tenure portability?

Now let’s flip the situation: As an administrator, one of your departments has an opportunity to “steal” a major scholar. In order to land “Dr. Fabulous,” you make the hire at a full-professor rank and talk your senior administration into waiving the normal two-year waiting period for granting tenure to previously tenured faculty hires. The good doctor, however, turns out to be a jerk and begins to indulge heavily in his “newly discovered passion” for writing botanical poetry, and only dabbles in the area of scholarship for which you actually hired him. There are few teeth in your post-tenure review processes because you have never assigned tenure at the point of hire. Pretty much you are stuck with him.

So would it be a good idea, or a bad one, for faculty members to be allowed to carry their tenure with them to another institution?