<p>Although Sakky tends to overstate the difficulty of everything, he is right that getting tenure is often rife with political jockeying and is quite difficult, especially at top schools. As far as I know, schools like MIT dont even bother with it anymore and mainly cycle in assistant profs for a few years then send them on their way and pick up a new batch. Even at my school, a middling Canadian university with no real brand power and limited research opportunities, the last six hires in my department were all PhDs from top programs in the US who, Im guessing, realized the difficulties of getting tenure at most big time US schools and decided to take a shot at it up north. I actually had a conversation about the process with one of the new profs, a very brilliant Harvard grad who teaches political philosophy, and he chracterized it as simply ‘frustrating.’</p>