Huh! I thought I posted comments about Reich last night. I guess those updates didn't get saved. I'll see if those are still in a browser window somewhere.
Apropos to Reich's article (which I mentioned yesterday), is 
this article which describes how industry (Microsoft, in particular) is buying influence at Universities. It mainly reinforces the idea that, with public funding being continuously cut, schools don't have any choice. But the article supports the idea that it is having a deleterious effect
"I think it has affected research in a big way," said Alan Shaw, an emeritus professor of computer science at the University of Washington, who has taught since the early 1970s. "It used to be that everyone was going after what seemed like the really big, long-term technical issues. It seems much more short-term now."