My first year at Columbia in 1994, the university set up a single computer lab in the engineering building (<https://cuit.columbia.edu/computer-lab-technologies/location...>) with them. Although they booted into HP-UX and its Motif window manager, MAE provided Mac emulation and, in practice, was usually used because most students were unfamiliar with X Window, of course.

MAE was slow and unstable in my experience unlike yours, and by the time I graduated Macs, I believe, replaced them, which made the lab consistent with what most of the other computer labs had.