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.
It may be true that some University/College are interested in research and teaching more than the grant money that is brought in to the department, but there's definitely a bias there. Even more important, if you don't have several graduate students working for you during tenure (supplementing your research & teaching efforts), it's going to be hard to tenure there either. How many classes/labs can you teach without an RA/TA? Remember the big intro courses that new untenured profs get, and that teaching grads is a big part of the job! You basically have to prove you can't handle grad students in some horribly catastrophic way not to get them from the dean/provost.
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.
"if you don't have several graduate students working for you"
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.
>Even more important, if you don't have several graduate students working for you during tenure (supplementing your research & teaching efforts), it's going to be hard to tenure there either.
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.
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.