> I take this statement to mean: Academia is failing us by not providing us with the next generation C. If that was the intent, I think it's not a fair jab.

I don't want to say that academia is failing or should responsible of giving us this "better C", just where I guess we should look to see "new C" coming is not there. However I think that academia may have a role in this matter, that is, to study the interaction between the programmer and the programming language about getting things done. This is probably done (but I can't remember famous recent studies about this) and could provide useful hints about how we can incrementally build / modify C to get a more reliable and less bug prone language.

However ultimately "new C" will be designed by one or two guys at max, as it always happened with this kind of practical programming languages.