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.

Professors don't collect money from undergrads to pay for research; they collect grants to fund themselves, their students, their labs, etc. They spend a tremendous amount of time and energy writing these grant proposals and submitting them to all the right people.

The reality is that most Research Professors (not all professors are on the tenure track, after all) are more motivated by research than by education, because they have to be. Nearly everything is stapled to #/quality of publications. If you don't like that, you'll have to revamp the whole system.

Besides, as much as we glorify it, teaching students sucks. Students do the bare minimum it takes to get the grades they want, and exhibit next to no real interest in the topics at hand. Add on to that that the professor has likely been researching an offshoot of this topic for years or even decades and you don't exactly have any motivation for the professor to put himself out there for the student.

If you want a professor to really care about you and make an active investment in you, you have to engage with him or her somewhere outside of class. The best way to do this is through research. If you want to put in your minimum to get your diploma, you're going to get that professor's minimum as well.

Well, maybe most professors at research universities. However, most teachers of higher education are not at such universities and are not conducting research.