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I doubt an university e-mail gives you significantly increased trust in the kernel community, since those are given to all students in all majors (most of which are of course much less competent at kernel development than the average kernel developer).

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There are two different kinds of trust: trust that you're a legitimate person with good intentions, and trust that you're competent.

A university or corporate e-mail address helps with the former: even if the individual doesn't put their real name into their email address, the institution still maintains that mapping. The possibility of professional, legal, or social consequences attaching to your real-world identity (as is likely to happen here) is a generally-effective deterrent.

University students could be naive and could be rapped by community if they unintentionally commit harmful patches, but if they send intentionally harmful patches, maintainers can report them to university and they risk getting expelled. In this particular case the research was approved and encouraged by university and hence, and in this process they broke trust placed on university.

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