Even if the answer to that question is nothing, that does not justify the conclusion that "education and research are only present at these institutions as window dressing".

Btw, are you oblivious to the fact that RMS invented the GPL and wrote the GNU C compiler and Emacs and formed the FSF (among other very useful things) while he was employed as a research scientist at MIT. And that, as far as I'm aware, for much of this time he had no other responsibilities than doing these things?

Also, are you aware that his undergraduate education is from Harvard, which certainly must have had some sort of effect on the interests that he chose later to pursue? (He's on record as stating that he enjoyed much of his education there.)

Stallman also maintained the MIT version of Lisp Machine Lisp and the MIT Lisp Machine OS for some of this time. It is working on this and seeing MIT's research "stolen" by Symbolics and other companies that in no small part led to his beliefs about free software.