Imagine you're a COO or VP of a publicly traded company that has many business relationships with other companies. You've invested years of your life and are completely committed to its success. There's a business deal that goes a little sour, and some egos are bruised as a result. Those people start talking to bloggers who begins spinning theories about why the deal went bad. Then the theories turn into rumors about your companies current dealings. The rumors take hold in the market and your stock starts to underperform. This then creates a negative feedback loop, drawing in more analysts, bloggers, twitter people to speculate about your current dealings. You know one or two of the more visible bloggers is cheering and working for your company's demise. Your stock becomes highly volatile even though you know your business fundamentals are not that bad. Marketing research shows your company's image being damaged. More and more of your time is spent dealing with clients who are starting to panic.
That's what presidents of these schools are dealing with. Now they probably are doing their due diligence to find better conference affiliations for their universities, but are doing so in a background of random conspiracy theories, most of it harmless but some of it may be malicious in intent. In the world of stocks, there are in theory laws on the books that punish those who circulate bad information either as libel or for the purpose of manipulating stock prices. There's probably not much protection for universities in the conference game though...
