Jolly,
When you speak of "CRM training in its current form", you are giving an impression that you are applying a massive broadbrush generalisation to what "CRM training" is.
There are many different trainers out there, carrying out classroom training, line training, and simulator training for many different operators and training organisations. They will all have different methods and ideas. What is very apparent from reading this forum regularly is that there are good trainers and bad trainers. Unfortunately, the bad trainers seem to have a disproportionately negative effect on their trainees, to the extent that bad training is worse than no training at all. This is because people feel patronised, that they are being made to indulge some airy-fairy politically-correct nonsense in place of straightforward common sense. This isnt because the CRM concept is wrong, it is because the trainer's methods are failing to reinforce the basic principles of CRM, which are, largely, commonsense, leadership, management, decision-making. People get very bogged down in the niceties of communication, which ,though important, are really part and parcel of the other skills.
I have trained CRM in each of the current disciplines, and have found that by far the most straightforward is in the simulator. You can stop the simulation as the aircraft is plunging in its death roll towards the earth, and ask the crew to just look again at what they have done to get it there, and how and why it has happened. Usually, they very quickly see for themselves what they have done, and there is a "Eureka" moment. You dont need to state the obvious. The crew can take the experience away as a self-taught lesson.
In the classroom, it is much more difficult to reinforce safety-centered behaviours without stating the bleeding obvious, patronising the experienced people present, and showing them a load of stuff they have seen before. It takes work and effort to be original and challenging and interesting. That is why it often doesnt produce the desired result.
If the training you witnessed was based on how to speak to each other nicely on the flight deck I think the trainer was missing issues which are more relevant today, such as automation complacency, mode awareness, or for helicopter operations situational awareness and decision-making in degraded visual environments.
Perhaps the professor you saw has spent too much time in the classroom, and not much on the flight deck recently.