Universities are also on a trend to not host their own stuff or run their own servers. Most US universities are either google or Microsoft schools which handle all the email and (often) file sharing services. A lot of this is from a combination of shrinking budgets and security-scares.

I think fediverse and universities could be interesting, and it may just need to take some slow momentum buildup and education of fedoverse services.

This is something that I have been thinking for some time. And not only the Fediverse, also Matrix, Gitea, etc.

I could imagine universities would not be jumping at the chance to have to moderate something, while also running very close to violating the First amendment if they removed any speech from that platform.