Having worked in university administration before I would say that anyone who lasts as a manager is a professional politician, so expect them to have engineered a very good reason and possibly have allied with another department.

As manager pay is usually based on headcount instead of being aligned with good outcomes, they might just have threatened someone's mortgage payments. So, that manager might be willing to call in every favor and fight with everything they have got.

But yeah of course it's possible that they got into more trouble than they can handle.