Same at my University in the mid-90s. I was the CS department network admin and we had an entire /24 to use as we liked.
At least it taught me how to detect attempted hacks early because every machine had to be monitored for attacks.
I just looked and they still have a /16 (65k public addresses). This is for a school that has maybe 15k students, not all of them living on the campus. And I’m sure most of the computing takes place in the cloud now anyway.
I know there are a lot of places who were on the Net early besides the military that have excess address capacity.
In my Uni days, all our department's machines had public IPs; no NAT, no firewall(!)
So much simpler to able to telnet, FTP and/or remote desktop straight from home to the office :)