It's not about universities, it's about grant funding over the next few years. It is very apt to collapse if AI is more useful than people. Why pay people to find this when tokens will do instead.

I'll let you in on a secret: In the US, most math professors don't seek grants. In most universities, I don't think grants are even a factor in their tenure application. It's quite different from engineering.

In my undergrad math department, only 2-3 faculty members out of a dozen bothered with grants.

Who will continue to develop neural nets if the mathematics training pipeline dries up? Will we see the frontier labs relinquish AI research to the machines themselves while their humans apply for unemployment benefits?

Who has been funding grants, and do you really think the grants are going to stop? There are infinite number of puzzles in Mathematics. The grants are not from companies like Boeing and Walmart who urgently need solutions for the problems, if they were I can understand why they might stop.