There is also a certain kind of long-term thinking prevalent in older universities. Many American elite universities are older than the US, and it's plausible that some of them will outlast the US. If the current government of the country that currently happens to exist around them requires X, they might as well do X, because it's a short-term issue anyway.
I was at the University of Cambridge around the Brexit vote. After the vote, I remember someone issuing a statement that basically said "We survived the Black Death. We survived the Great War. We will survive this." I found it highly amusing.
The cynic's version of the Golden Rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules." If universities are going to be dependent on federal money, they have to dance to the tune the federal government called.
We see that as a negative now, when Trump is calling the tune. But that does raise a question: How much of the liberalism and DEI at colleges was because that was the tune the feds were calling at that time? How much of it wasn't the universities' own desire?
I think the hostility towards standardized testing comes from donors whose children would qualify for legacy admissions except that they can't test their way out of a paper bag and are a little too ethical or afraid of the consequences to hire a ringer to take the test for them.
