Anyone who has ever brought up children or babysat grand children recognizes the feigned butthurt a child exhibits when trying to get anything they want.
Stomp your feet, scream, cry like a blubbering fool (checking for reaction from the authority figure). It is a game of will and endurance; in the vernacular, if you blink you lose.
It is all about advantage and young inexperienced minds testing the bounds of their power and what they can and can’t get away with. In the case of these Universities that ‘blink’, the butthurt never ends and eventually the institution becomes a mini-island of “Lord of the Flies”.
The only way to win is to not play their game in the first place.
Clearly, they have never been told “Hell no! Now get your butt out of here and get back to work!” in their entire lives.