We are apparently talking about very different kinds of professors at very different kinds of institutions.
Unless he were to actually commit a crime, I don't think there is anything my ex-boss could have possibly done which could have ended up with him being removed from his post. He was simply too important to the institution in terms of his reputation and his ability to attract external funding.
How he treated his students was really neither here nor there, as long as the money and the citations kept rolling in.
> He was simply too important to the institution in terms of his reputation and his ability to attract external funding.
This reinforces my idea that you should always go with an advisor who doesn't have this kind of clout. Not that you should have known this ahead of time or you did anything wrong, but I have heard sad stories from large labs enough to be thankful for avoiding them in the past, and it's the advice I will pass on in the future.
I think if you wanted to get at the actual problem and a solution to it, I would say the problem is sad narcissistic jerks aiming to become kings of their research kingdoms, and then they act as tyrants when they get a hold of large sums of grant money. That may be the experience some people have had.
A solution to this that you may like if you want more oversight may be to treat a research lab more like a corporation with a board of directors (I can hear the researchers recoiling) or some other governing body over the lab and the students itself. What do you think of that idea?
Rule by committee. So many examples of that working out great.
How about keeping the apprenticeship aspect just having more masters? One year of just comprehend exams, one year where you’re supposed to devote half your time to research with an advisor and half to comps, and three years where you work on six different projects with different advisors in six month chunks? Some of those will be written up as failures, but basically you end up with 3+ Master’s theses. That’s a great deal more love research academia than legal academia and they don’t seem to lack for scholarly work or impact.
Class assignments and number of classes taught per semester, teaching times and locations, class sizes, advising assignments, committee assignments, TA allocations, grader allocations, internal grants, withholding or revoking consulting permission, withholding internal department funding, lack of promotion (there is still a ladder after tenure), and most of all reputation, which in academia has higher currency than currency.
Tenured professors still have a job to do and they still have a boss (lots of bosses, as I said), and if they don't do their job they can still get fired (I've seen it happen), or their lives can be made miserable.
If there's an issue of academic dishonesty then there there are processes at journals, conferences, and funding agencies to address concerns. I've also witnessed these processes work as intended.