My workload has only steadily increased once I got tenure. The nature of the work changed, but the "Kick back, relax and enjoy your zero effort forever job" is a fantasy of people who don't actually know what they're talking about.

i’ve personally known a number of tenured professors who’ve systematically shirked all responsibility after their tenure event. they’ve been willing to live as semi-pariahs within their peer group though.

even when required to teach they simply repeat classes they’ve taught many times before making no effort to optimize for reviews.

i don’t doubt your experience but i wonder how much it has to do with not wanting to endure your colleagues’ and departments’s disapproval vs actual threat to employment.

and fwiw, i’m not saying it has to be this way just that it can be this way due to the structure of the system. similarly there are many corporate situations in which one can scrape by for extended periods of time, but there is rarely a “for life” clause. even so, it hasn’t prevented the university system from helping to catalyze all the amazing discoveries we all benefit from in society every day.

fwiw, i agree with most of the points in @Fomite’s response below. the people i’ve known fall into a perverse version of his “ego” point.

they felt that when they got tenure they “won” and their “ego” was strong enough to allow them to ignore the disapproval of their peers for not doing the conventionally expected things. they felt that they knew better in their hearts what the discipline truly needed and that the rat-race of establishment approval wasn’t it. so they turned inward. which is not necessarily the healthiest path imo.

There's definitely a few of those.

I mean, there are definitely people who coast, because there are people everywhere who coast.

But the vast majority of tenured professors I know don't do so, for one of the following reasons:

- I can't get fired, but I also don't need to get paid. My position has a non-trivial soft money component to it, and it's actually low for my field, which ranges from 50% to 100% soft money depending on the institution. A double-digit pay cut is motivation for most people.

- There are still promotions to be had, and those promotions are really the only way to get a raise beyond cost of living increases. At my institution there are two steps beyond Associate Professor with Tenure, and both of them are not obtained by phoning it in.

- Ego. It's hard to understate this one. Most academics are smart, determined people. There are other easier, more lucrative jobs. But there's a sense of purpose and ego that channeled them to the career they're in. Said ego is usually not fed by being in the doldrums. That's not how you get awards and invited to talks, and recruited elsewhere, etc.

Sure, the stick of "You could get fired" isn't there, but there are also ways to make a tenured professor whose coasting's life less pleasant. But even if not, I don't think it's nearly as common as the popular imagination (or this thread) think it is. Most people I know only really take their foot of the gas in the last few years of their careers, often well past retirement age.