Disclaimer: My wife is one of those professors (accounting).
In my experience professors care deeply about their students. Hell, most academics exist outside of fundable research. Think of the hundreds of humanities professors at every university. While they all have research interests... they hardly have anyone wanting to throw money at it.
The article actually touched on the fundamental issue. My wife did her time at a major research university. She finally decided that she'd rather spend her time as an educator, rather than as research arm for governmental policy (top level accounting professors play a big role in setting the direction of policy decisions).
She is now at a teaching-focused institution, but there is one problem: certain administrators continue to think in terms of the elite university model. They use the research metric, rather than the educational metrics as the ones to base advancement on. My wife is fortunate. Her time at the research focused institution has left her with a lifetimes worth of material for publishing. She can focus on teaching and her students benefit from it. A huge (epic) shortage of accounting professors means she is quite secure in her job... but that's definitely not true for most disciplines. So instead of being allowed to focus on students, these professors are FORCED into focusing on research. This is a scenario played out over and over again.
I'm not really sure what the right answer is, but I do think the traditional elite university model is quite broken at the lower level universities.
In my experience professors care deeply about their students. Hell, most academics exist outside of fundable research. Think of the hundreds of humanities professors at every university. While they all have research interests... they hardly have anyone wanting to throw money at it.
The article actually touched on the fundamental issue. My wife did her time at a major research university. She finally decided that she'd rather spend her time as an educator, rather than as research arm for governmental policy (top level accounting professors play a big role in setting the direction of policy decisions).
She is now at a teaching-focused institution, but there is one problem: certain administrators continue to think in terms of the elite university model. They use the research metric, rather than the educational metrics as the ones to base advancement on. My wife is fortunate. Her time at the research focused institution has left her with a lifetimes worth of material for publishing. She can focus on teaching and her students benefit from it. A huge (epic) shortage of accounting professors means she is quite secure in her job... but that's definitely not true for most disciplines. So instead of being allowed to focus on students, these professors are FORCED into focusing on research. This is a scenario played out over and over again.
I'm not really sure what the right answer is, but I do think the traditional elite university model is quite broken at the lower level universities.