On the other hand, I know many happy and successful professors doing excellent work inside the system. Most of the well-known people in my field are really very

On the other hand, I know many happy and successful professors doing excellent work inside the system. Most of the well-known people in my field are really very good at what they do, and the work is progressing quickly. Deep learning is a big thing, yes? Hinton, Bengio, LeCun, etc. All that work originated in universities under completely conventional structures. Companies snatched it up once it was clear it would be the next big thing. Self driving cars might have some impact? Thrun, Fox & Burgard were key players in probabilistic state estimation, wrote the Book, and trained the car people at $(BigCo). At universities. Just to balance out some of the 'academia has no idea what it's doing' statements in this thread. It's not perfect but it's not ineffective.