[LouAvul]

The grownups ceded control of American Universities when American Universities stopped being educational institutions and became businesses. Businesses with the sole purpose of financing the lifestyles of (what used to be known as) teacher and administrators. Now, they’re terrified to displease entitlement brats because they’re afraid of reduced cash flow.

[Mmmike]

Most of the older universities were the projects of specific church denominations. These schools quickly began to play out the Protestant dynamic on an intellectual level, serving as a sort of radical vanguard for their day and age, while the rest of the culture, although caught up in the same dynamic, tended to lag behind academe since it wasn't in a hurry to push the dynamic toward its endgame ("building the kingdom of God on earth," "pushing knowledge wherever it may take us", all in the absence of an openly unifying principle.)

This dynamic was embedded with a crisis of authority; any claim regarding an overarching purpose, any statement of a unifying principle could be trumped by an appeal to personal sovereignty -- the political aspect of the Protestant dynamic to which the philosophical aspects are subordinated. So the whole thing was bound to be revolutionary. This revolution happened to play out in stages.

When many of the universities became businesses or tools of government, that was a pivotal step in the long process of incremental revolutions. The crisis of authority persists -- there is no one willing to "displease the entitlement brats", as you say. There is no one to identify or nominate an explicit authority empowered to fix the problem, because the old dynamic will instantly shoot it down. So the entitlement brats, or rather the government who manipulates them, are the de facto authority.