Better Adaptation

If the people with skills that are the most valuable outside of academia leave universities in disproportionate numbers (as I think they do), students will miss out on what they have to offer, and there the risk that academia will grow progressively more insular. How might one counteract this effect?

One straightforward remedy is to create more opportunities for interactions between academia and industry. There is already some work in this area in the form of industrial postdocs. I think these kinds of positions can be effective mechanisms for helping people transition to industry positions, but when used as such, their impact is limited. Unless the postdoc returns to academia (and I would guess that a relatively small fraction do), only one trainee really benefits.

It's moving people in the opposite direction, from industry to academia where they can teach, that could really make a difference. This kind of thing happens informally on occasion - a famous retired luminary from industry will get some office space in a department and show up from time to time - but to really maximize the benefits, one would need to recruit people still active in industrial research and figure out ways to have them impart their skills and knowledge (particularly in areas less prevalent in academia) to a broad range of students and faculty members.

I think such a program could be run on a small scale relatively inexpensively: a set of teaching fellowships that could serve the role of a sabbatical for people in industry. In addition to being able to offer some unique courses, departments would benefit by gaining relationships with corporate labs - collaborations could mean new funding sources as well as jobs for promising students. Companies would benefit from potential technology transfer and having their people learn new skills, so everybody wins.