If "deadwood" is so offensive, let's replace it with "retired in place." But we need another word for "retired in place" (or RIP, ha!) faculty who then are, to keep with the pun, revivified about three years before they want to retire as full (a reward for those decades of hard, hard work), having done nothing for the prior 15. A couple articles, and boom! Full professor time. The word: losers. A better word than "I-wouldn't-vote-for-your-promotion-if-my-life-depended-on-it."
Around here, these faculty are often referred to as "METRP", an acronym coined by a long departed dean. It stands for "Minimum Effort To Retain Position" and often showed up on salary evaluations.
I once worked at a university where they were called "the senate" and the department exiled them to offices in a row on an obscure floor (reachable only from one wing of the building), far away from the rest of the department. Everyone, but everyone, laughed about it.
