They got grant money to work on anything but TCP/IP. :-) A lot of European oral history about how "the Internet" got to a Uni talks about how they were supposed to only use ISO/OSI but eventually unofficially installed IP anyway.
There's the other story of corporate vendors saying "yes, we will implement OSI, give us X time but buy our product now and we will deliver OSI" then actually going "we mangled BSD Sockets enough to work if you squint enough, let's try to wait the client off while racking the profit"
