He's not criticizing 'the institutions' so much as their ideas and modernism itself which, funny enough, is one of the 14 handy 'heuristics' for identifing nascent facism that Eco listed in 1995 [1].

It's a good list. At the risk of courting Godwin I'd suggest that 'concentration camps' would be a good 15th point but I guess it's covered more generally.

[1] https://kottke.org/16/11/the-14-features-of-eternal-fascism

The standard criticism of academia these days is that it has abandoned modernism for postmodernism, not that it's too modernist.

Fascism itself was also very modernist in many ways, such as the obsession with industry and technology, the aspiration to innovate "beyond" liberalism and Marxism, and even the artistic and architectural styles it adopted.