You’re right on the money.
The commencement of industrial funding of education, and the simultaneous abandonment of the confessional nature of most colleges seeking industrial funding, was the proximate cause of the embrace of “Progressivism” as an overarching political programme and logical positivism as the default philosophical perspective of the modern university.
It took a century for that shift to work itself fully through the system, and for nearly all the previously regnant philosophies to be expelled, but here we are.
The founding of Stanford, the University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins were the bellwethers; everybody else just wanted a piece of the action.