I'd say your circle of friends and programming languages researchers are the best part of universities. The fun part of exploring new ideas happens far more often at a university then at say, Accenture.

But the paper chase is utter horror. Crap papers and crap results are trotted-out as productivity in some sort of bibliometrics hell-scape.

Quantity rather than quality is part of the wrong path academia took. PG is right to focus on universities as ripe for a shake-up.