Does "without students to advise" mean "(the principal investigators) have no students to advise"?

Context:

Bleak grey skies mirror the mood of the skeleton staff trickling through the gates of the main US National Institutes of Health campus in Bethesda, Maryland. Most of the principal investigators are absent: without students to advise or meetings to attend, there is little point in being there. Perhaps one out of every ten windows is lit up, revealing lonely postdocs working on what few experiments they are allowed to maintain as the US government shutdown drags on.