I'm used to working with competent purchasing / contract management peeps on these kind of things. They'll ask painful questions, get feedback from "SMEs" and so on. They'll bitch when there is no internal knowledge or when there are no honest enough people that will admit to the limits of their expertise.

I think the more interesting part of this is what the uni brings to the table? There must be something you're giving (up), as "free" implies there is another benefit to OpenAI. Maybe it's just a vendor-lock, in the good old lock-'em-while-they're-young ways of MS and Goog -e.g. an "exclusive partnership" where no money but simply product preference changes hands?

Yeah that's a red flag.