This is a strange comment that probably reflects the sliver of academics you're familiar with. Who do you think wrote and continues to develop R and all those packages? There are actually many types of software in use by academics.
Academics (the mass noun, meaning something similar to "academia") does indeed learn and progress. Academics (the worker bees in the academic hive) can be super intransigent and in my experience learn a couple of tools in their younger days and never again. As they say, science advances one funeral at a time. I've found that new ideas and technologies are almost always brought in by new students, and not old academic dogs learning new technological tricks.
And I agree, but the end might be a bit optimistic at how often or efficiently that happens. In my experience, most are all too willing to accept the institutionalized choices.
There are actually a surprising number of academics in the Clojure for data science study groups. A lot of them ran into performance or portability issues with Python or R and found Clojure tools as a good solution.
