I'm not going to get into the ideology, but it's disappointing to see a university, of all places, switch from a relatively small provider to a massive megacorp.
So much good opensource software has come from university funding and university-originated projects and you'd kinda hope that that culture pervades. I guess Duke isn't quite Stanford or Berkeley, though.
Maybe they didn't choose Microsoft To Do as a replacement for Basecamp, but they are using Microsoft products anyway and this is just one individual's to do list for the sake of this screenshot? I just want to state the possibility, because they didn't say anything about their new tool.
I neither know Basecamp nor To Do that well, so I might be completely wrong. But I think Basecamp plays in a different league than To Do, doesn't it?
I have no insider knowledge but I suspect that the university's existing contact with Microsoft already included Microsoft To Do. This department might have started using it because it was "free" (to them) and decided it was good enough at that price point.
This is just one department within the university. It's not uncommon to see small groups paying for some software only to eventually replace it with a site licensed enterprise alternative.
See also: MS Teams replacing Slack at big organizations