I don't know what academic institutions you're talking about (it means university in my book), but in non of the academic institutions I worked for did the academics have anything to do with IT decision making (except for maybe filling out a survey). Which is unfortunate because then we wouldn't have to deal with stupid IT people coming from large businesses and thinking that universities are just the same as any business. To give you examples of some of the stupidity I have seen from university IT (and yes they are almost completely recruited from other large businesses): operating system researchers not given admin rights, every semester break reimaging the lab pc and never checking that the special drivers and software for the lab equipment is installed correctly (solution: have the professors/academics check every lab PC before semester starts, great thing to check 200 PCs one week before the beginning of the lectures where you have lots of other things to do), no ability to share calendars with outside people because security (suggested workaround just sync to Google on you phone and use that, I kidd you not). Generally, only buy Microsoft (or some other huge proprietary vendor) tech which can never be adjusted to the needs of the academics actually working with it.
TLDR there is lots of things wrong with It in academia, but academics making the decisions is not one of them. Also, generally most universities I know about were reasonably well prepared for online courses and it worked largely seemlessly.