This is simply untrue. When on deep-dives into any kind of research on sees an ocean full of universities polluting the sea with absolute crap. The more bureaucratic and government funded, the worse. For example, I know researchers who simply will not bother to read anything written by anyone working for a Chinese university.
But this:
> The more bureaucratic and government funded, the worse
is definitely untrue. You are thinking too much of hollywood-movies, this is not reality.
Just think of ML and Deep Learning. The university of toronto is publicly funded, as is the technical university of Munich, where schmidhuber (and hochreiter) produced a lot of the groundbreaking research we are all relying on. Or the university of montreal with joshua bengio. And the technical university of munich is not even in the states! SHOCKING! No private universities to be seen anywhere.
this is just not true. They just hire the best of the best but if one deep-dives into any kind of research one can see an ocean full of universities producing valuable research. And most of the time the basic breakthroughs came from universities you didn't think of or you didn't even know.