What you're describing is research in fields with lots of grant funding. In some fields, you don't spend your time writing grants, and you don't hire grad students to do your research for you. In those fields, teaching is important because you do a lot of it. In grant-heavy fields, it wouldn't matter if the university shut down their undergraduate programs, because the emphasis would still be on bringing in grant dollars.
Perhaps in a field like philosophy or math at a very small school it's possible with amazing individual results, but it's uncommon in my experiences which include watching numerous friends at many different schools (>10) and fields (bio, chem, phys, geo, cs, math, philosophy) both public and private.
Maybe you mean outside the US? I'd believe that. Europe hasn't gone as far down the path of non-tenured teaching faculty as the US, but due to money they seem to be starting to.
And that feeds the birth/death demographics problem where the reason why its hard to get a tenure position is the previous generation had to produce 10, 20, 30 qualified grads in order for them to get their previous generation tenure position, so 10, 20, 30 minus one person are going to get training and education for a position they will never be allowed to fill. I'm sure they'll find something to do with their lives, although to get position XYZ they never trained for, they'll be competing with people who actually trained and studied for XYZ work, and in the end it just means a different name is on the unemployment lists.
Academia is a weird pyramid scheme of human suffering.
I think you ignored his point altogether. I was at a top university. While it was common for an engineering professor to have between 5-10 students and 2 post docs, the folks in the social sciences like anthropology have much less (2-5 students is what I would guess). Someone has to pay them and those disciplines have little grant money.
Just checked my school's anthropology department: 25 faculty members and 75 graduate students - so roughly 3 per faculty member. Their Electrical engineering department? Almost 6 per faculty.
This is typically not the case. Academics will have a number of students working for them and many academics push them incredibly hard while doing very little of the actual research themselves. Instead they spend their time chasing funding. Projects are often built on prior work so many new papers explore new areas of a previous discovery or measure said discovery in a new way. So you’re not discovering three new things every year. Some academics will even be bold enough to publish the same data in multiple journals with minor changes in analysis.
With academic research it’s often a case of two steps forward one step back. You spend years working towards deep expertise in a field through postgraduate studies and then a postdoc or two. Then when you become academic staff you suddenly become an inexperienced manager and teacher. So you pass the work to inexperienced students who spend years relearning everything and often suffering from over aggressive supervision or complete abandonment. The funding bodies, as is their right, are increasingly looking for commercial outcomes to research so the scope moves from Research to r&D with a little ‘r’. So we see research on battery technology making ludicrous claims or graphene in all the things rather than real progress.
This stunts the potential of scientific discovery in favour of pushing revenue generating students through universities and chasing funding for short term gain.