This is desperately cynical and I'm struggling to picture an academic being told that. What did you teach, what was the university and what field were you in?
I've seen the same (from the student perspective). This philosophy applies to a lot of mid-tier public schools whose major selling point to students is "job marketability".
For certain departments an amount of prestige is owed not just to the research you put out, but how many students you successfully place in jobs in the field.
I studied geography at a mid tier public school and this school of thought was pretty prevalent. The professors used open source software in their research but when I learned statistics it was IBM SPSS and GIS was all ESRI and MapInfo. The department even hand curates a list of alumni and their current employers for marketability to future students.
