Institutions of higher learning in fact generally try their hardest to homogenize student culture. Both elite and state universities have taken to adopting sensitivity and cultural etiquette that in a obvious way serve to acclimate foreign and rural students to elite culture and enforce its values. Students are bluntly given the lines of acceptance of homosexuals and the transgendered and many workshops compel students to watch or participate in skits and activities to support the causes of modern feminism, the profuse atonement of white sin and the other staples of modern Western culture. Campus events are similarly monotonous, with a constant stream of values feeding into their subjects.
Of course to the well-trained Western observer, this doesn't sound like brain-washing or cultural enforcement at all, only a "universal" value inculcation. The uniformity of thought enforced by the educational system is so complete that its members are much like the American who when told that his accent was enjoyable responded innocently, "But Americans don't have accents!"
Cultural values are the same; when they are so thick in the blood, their hosts can't differentiate them from reality. In the idea, the cultures of developing nations are not uncivilized, they're simply unlearned in the correct universal values including feminism, tolerance and multicultural etiquette. Universities believe themselves to be untainted by culture, much like missionaries who in their own minds assume that their proselytizing is not cultural expansionism, only the objective communication of fundamental spiritual truths.
In this way, academia, particularly the most fervent and pious community of the social sciences, is significantly less cognizant of its on nature and actions than it was sixty years ago. It used to be that one of the primary goals of higher education was the creation of cultured and liberally educated students; classical education exposed Western students to the values and traditions of the West and the rest explicitly, not devoid of chauvinistic propagandizing , but acknowledging the important interplay between cultures. Education was acculturation akin to Matthew Arnold's statement of culture as "the pursuit of the best of what is thought and said in the world."
Nowadays, Arnold is a chauvinist himself for even implying that one culture could be "better" than any other; instead students are told to be so happily nihilistic and open that useful critical analysis of their own and others' culture is defunct. And what have we gotten for it? For all the pretensions of a multicultural and popular curriculum, students cannot differentiate Daoism from Confucianism, they are clueless as the the disputes personified in Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois and are only being trained to retroject their modern values on the past to further simplify their already underestimated intellectual hurdles.
University culture may still ignite some fervor in students, but it has become a stagnant pond. What students hear in activist classrooms is not arcane radicalism or a new promise for a liberated life, but the same tired social drivel copiously repeated since the late 80's. The revolution is now a status quo force and the ancient vanguard party of the Left has become the most mockable and paternalistic element of intellectual society. But if the jokes of students are a testament to future sentiments, its time may be limited.