Absolutely not. Look at the publication record of any tenured professor at a non R1 university and you'll typically find that it's dropped to almost nil.
True, I really just meant "at R1 universities." Which isn't fair to all those other tenured professors at non-R1 universities (and I may possibly even be one, someday).
Of course, I have heard of R1 tenured professors who claim to spend 50% of their effort procuring funding (though I think 10% is a much more representative estimate).
I've heard believable claims that "here professors don't write research papers, professors write grant proposals" - quite a few of them advance research and get paper authorship by leading a lab and procuring funding for the team that does the actual research and writes the papers.
And I'm not dissing them in any way - getting a grant requires the senior/experienced guys working on it. Getting the funding is a must-have (since without it researchers and students would be dismissed and the research would not exist); but spending your own time researching is a nice-to-have thing that you can do if there's any spare time left after teaching and bureaucracy.
Also, the research that people are writing grants for and doing is dictated by what is fundable, which is not necessarily exactly what they'd choose to be doing were there no constraints.
I know tenured professors who don't apply for grants, and therefore don't have any money to pay students, but they still get paid a salary by the department. They can do whatever they want (research, or not), modulo teaching responsibilities. Some profs actually do very good research, without students. It's a reasonable way to go, once you have tenure.
Problem is, you can't take that route to get tenure in the first place, unless you're an absolute genius.
Most places are redefining tenure though, so the only people that still have any meaningful resources are those that have extramural funding. Anymore, tenure means you get a closet for an office and a phone. And for new hires, if you don't have grant support, even with tenure, you can still lose your job.
Writing a grant proposal is about as hard as writing a paper. So if they apply for three grants and also write three papers in a year, then yeah - that's 50%.
I don't think that's a valid generalization. It depends enormously on the funding agency and the place you're submitting the paper, respectively.
You're not going to be able to do a good grant proposal unless you have a good track record of research, with multiple papers. So in that sense, a grant proposal supersedes a single paper.
But, given that you've already done all those papers, a grant proposal is just writing, not new research, so it should actually be massively less work than doing all the original research that goes into a paper.
