To ask a team of designers to do brand and marketing research and design a new logo for a big organisation that will use said logo everywhere is not a 1K euro freelancer job.
To be fair, the new logo is a bit crap, but in the grand scheme of things, 80K is not a lot at all.
There is overhead for the person itself (employer subsidized healthcare, office space, equipment) and there is overhead within the organization. Like a secretary and accounting departments who cannot be billed to a client. And management layers of course…
Most likely the 80k are enough to cover one person-year for a consulting agency in Eastern Europe.
That said, the new logo is atrocious.
But I believe my point stands regardless—80K is very little money indeed from a group perspective.
Arguably the public image of a university is its most important asset. Because that attracts the best students, researchers and third party funding (public and private).