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State university professors are technically "government employees." There are, of course, some absolutely brilliant academics out there.

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University professor is the only viable career path for basic research. Similarly anyone interested in extraterrestrial robotics can basically only find a job doing that at NASA. It's much easier to attract brilliant people if the private industry doesn't offer any jobs in the field.

Still you see many great professors being hired away into private industry.

And yet, by many metrics (e.g. number of academic prizes), the best University professors work for private Universities like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford.

Those same people are also part of the massive research system run and funded by the federal government.

Most medical schools, especially the ones you listed, are incredibly dependent on NIH funding and they'd be unrecognizable without it. Without that support (funding, but also the review process and infrastructure stuff like PubMed and the NCBI tools), very little of the prize-winning work would be possible.

The best state schools are generally comparable in that regard.

Berkley, UCLA, Cornell (partly), UNC, Pitt, U Michigan, and the UIUC, among others, are powerhouses in certain fields.

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