Hm. Are you saying that students aren’t paying tuition for an education? Are you saying that it’s good for professors not to teach their students? Maybe I’m not following you ...
Professors, besides teaching students, typically have a job description that includes conducting research (or doing scholarship in soft fields, or producing art in the arts), advising students, and doing a great deal of what in academe is called “governance”, but in commerce would be called “management”: we make hiring decisions, we make admissions decisions for graduate programs (and, at some institutions, undergraduate programs), set policies for majors and graduate programs, make post-hiring promotion decisions (or at least advise on these), pursue funding for research and educational programs from both public and private sources outside the university,. . .
And, at most universities, the cost of running the place is only about 1/3 funded by student tuition payments, the balance coming from endowments, research grants, or, in the case of state universities, subsidies from the state, which regards the provision of higher education as a public good.
Typically professors’ job evaluations consider teaching to be 1/3 of the basis for their evaluation, which is actually about correct, in terms of what we are actually being paid to do.
If you’d like to condemn the U.S. to lag behind the rest of the world in science and technology, by all means go on advocating having university faculty only teach students and not do research. And you can see to it that even more money (whether out of student tuition or other sources) is wasted by paying yet more professional administrators to take over hiring, promotion, and admissions decisions (even though they don’t know how to evaluate work in say mathematics or physics or chemical engineering or Byzantine history or. . ., while the faculty in the relevant area do).