It’s possible that the university paid your publication fees so that they didn’t end up on your desk. The university paid for mine, but there for sure were fees.
This system looks like it has such a great opportunity to be overtaken by free journals. Universities are in a great position to make this happen if they can weed out their political corruption through a system of rules and transparency. However, having worked in academia, I can see how this would be really hard to pull off. All of those egos competing to be the top ego and cliques can catastrophically toxify a project without resolve.