Universities are educational institutions, and invited speakers are invited by little committees made up of professors, students, administrators, and board memb

Universities are educational institutions, and invited speakers are invited by little committees made up of professors, students, administrators, and board members. The chemistry dept has some speaker series and they figure hey we gotta please the physical chemists and the polymer chemists and give a spot to the organic chem folks, and oh our students are getting hired by a lot of pharma companies recently so let's have some industry speaker from pharma, and we ought to have some alumni & some networking thing. Some activist group will have a committee and will decide to focus on (whatever). The student activities board will have something and will have some pro-Trump kid advocating for inviting Milo and some first-generation immigrant kid advocating for someone else and some other kid advocating for Natalie Portman. I've been on a bunch of these little committees. It's a combo of who has a bee in their bonnet, what speakers fit the schedule, and who will talk for free or for cheap if we can't get funding for high-profile speakers. We've managed to get Nobel Prize winners because they were in town for another speaking engagement at the right time and we could broker a deal. You seem to imply that there's a big institution-wide agreement to serve some institution-wide set of interests. On a mundane level, this simply isn't true. You're seeing the outside of a bunch of misfit cats scrapping for meager amounts of cash and drawing some pretty grand conclusions. Patterns emerge out of this system but they're not, in general, intentional or under the control of any single entity.