Hmm, in my experience this is actually a depressingly common game that universities play:
(1) Pay design firm mucho bucks to "redesign identity." [The fee is usually insanely huge, especially considering the quality of the result and the probable amount of effort that went into it.]
(2) Get truly horrible result back, which is universally hated by everybody except the design firm. [Well, who knows what they actually think behind closed doors, but in public, they have total confidence in the thing they're getting paid a huge fee for.]
(3) Spend huge amounts of time and money trying to force people to use it, usually resulting in people hating the new "identity" even more. Often this involves draconian regulations that absolutely forbid any use of the old logo in any context whatsoever (amusing when talking about history of course...), and creation of new infrastructure solely for brand-identity enforcement (and remember, this is a university we're talking about here...).
(4) Either (a) eventually give up and go back to the old logo, (b) successfully browbeat everybody into going along with the new order until all the people that remember the old logo have died, or (c) officially maintain the new logo while in practice everything except the school letterhead just quietly uses the old logo anyway. [Which of these happens depends on university politics.]
I've personally been associated with two universities that have gone through exactly this idiotic process, and have heard of others second-hand.
In most cases the whole thing seems to be a sort of an ego project for the university administration, who think it's a chance to "refresh things." Once the design firm gets started with the vague hand waving and justifications, the administration almost always seems to be gullible--and egotistical--enough to accept pretty much anything they say at face value. Even once it becomes clear that it's a complete cock-up, backing down would be an admission of failure, and there's no way the administration is gonna do that unless there are mass protests and burning of faculty.
Commercial firms sometimes do similar things, but are generally a bit less gullible AFAICS, I guess because they tend to be a bit more hard-headed (university administrations are often, well, kinda...wooly...).