Nation states and criminal organizations have considered universities a valuable target for a long time now. Easier than financial institutions and military targets, campus-wide networks, sensitive data on thousands and thousands of students, often lots of powerful hardware and even research equipment to botnet or abuse for processing/mining coing. Lots of value in owning them.

It could be a very important university to even be considered strategic for an opposing state, you also have to consider the fact that at the level of military strategy it can be a target to prevent culturally growing people.... That's why I'm not surprised. Then it is not only the university, it is the whole country that is affected.

It's just retribution and harassment. From what I understand, the way it works is that the Russian state harbors criminals as long as they don't attack Russian targets. So in some cases, the malware they used literally checked for a Russian language pack on Windows and left the computer alone if it found that. They are essentially modern day privateers, harassing soft targets of an adversary.