alt Hacker News> As for reducing: research, grad programs, journals, media inquiries - these are not optional for profs
For a tenured professor (and someone who runs the department's grad program and teaches many classes almost certainly has a tenure) all of those are optional. During my PhD I have seen all sorts of arrangements, including tenured profs who taught minimum load and did nothing else. No grad students, no special courses, no seminars, nada. I am not advocating this. It is, in my book, not a good approach unless you spending all other time to solve Riemannian Hypothesis or something like this. But tenure gives a prof a lot of leeway on how much to work and what to work on. My 2c.
I'm the author of the original article, I'm a tenured professor, and none of these things is optional for me. Indeed, I wrote this article several years into being a full professor, because my obligations had only grown, not reduced, by virtue of all the promotions. Of course different people have different senses of how "obliged" they are or should be.