You may be surprised that academics exist in places that don't have 'university' or 'college' in their name. From experience, folks at places like IBM TJ Watson Research Center, AT&T Bell Labs, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center or DEC Western Research Lab considered themselves academics, had academic job descriptions and did the work of academics.

I'm not even slightly surprised that people who were worth their salt and could actually create fled universities and went to private industry and did great things there, while traditional academia languished and stagnated. It's not the people who are necessarily unsuited, it's the institutions.