Hi Phil, 
thanks for your comment and interest in this topic. Yes, I have been involved in discussions about creating relations with the universities in the UK on a couple of channels. 

The community was against changing current tagging since many universities are using OSM for their website maps. There are some examples across the globe proposed, but the final was do not change already tagged entities. 

No one objected to the idea of creating type=site relations since for some universities, you will find a lot of buildings, land, and accommodation operated by a certain university, and they are not of the same type. 

The main thing for creating these relations is to make these universities visible and easily searchable on OSM. The operator tag is not searchable in the current search box, you will need to have overpass knowledge for this, and even then you will not have all things in one place. This was the first thing done, adding an operator tag based on the uni website, but it turned out to be a time-consuming job, a lot of things were not tagged, and if someone removes the tag, you will not have a result in a query. A lot of unexperienced mappers delete tags on ID editor, but if you have a relation, that is way difficult to remove so it gives the extra safety that the university will be found at the end. 

Another thing is that you can put variant names on just one relation and that will cover the search in different languages. Germany has a lot of relations to fix similar issues. 

After creating the relation I would like to improve geometries, one by one University at the time, add variant names and probably create a MapRoullete task across other communities to name them on their languages. Also, there is a tagging schema that is still under proposal, but I do not see that it will not be approved and then it will be way easier to add just member type and everything will be in line. 

But yes, it was discussed on Loomio and talk-gb, also some emails were exchanged with OSMUK board. I have also received some positive feedback for some users, but I also appreciate your concern.