A bit of wit from Tenured Radical, and thanks to Siva for the pointer:

People ask me — pointing to various colleagues who are well-known for being intellectually and pedagogically moribund to some degree, and who are actually voting on tenure cases — “Well, do you want more people like that? And if occasionally the standards are set too high, isn’t that ultimately a good thing?” And my answer is: “Hmmm. No, but — .” And I think about what other line of work in the world puts people, productive or not, who are at the end of their careers in charge of judging the ideas of the young, which seems to me more to the point. If the computer industry were run like university faculties, we would all still be using electric typewriters.