I'm not sure who "they" are, but certainly not the core development team, and Samuel Tesla does not represent them. See for example Rob Pike saying how mind blowing and inspiring Tony Hoare's CSP paper is, how everyone should read it and how it inspired Go[1]. Another example is how Go's regexp implementation has a solid mathematical foundation[2]. Now, those are two examples of quite old programming research being used to good effect in Go, so there is an opening for criticism there. But in general I'm pretty sure the core go devs don't have have anything against programming research nor try to create this false dichotomy.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DtUzH3zoFo [2] http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html