Are there universities with policies that default intellectual property decisions to faculty?
The University of Illinois (where I am a faculty member) classifies most written faculty work as &quot;traditional academic copyrightable works&quot;, and by explicit policy all such works are owned by their authors.  If their creation requires university resources &quot;over and above those usually and customarily provided&quot;, then by default the university gets a royalty-free non-exclusive license, but even that requirement is routinely waived.
My university also supports faculty releasing their software under open-source licenses.  In principle, any code developed with the support of a research grant requires university approval before it can be released, but in practice, faculty routinely publish their research code without prior approval (or censure) from the university.  I can see the possibility of a dispute arising if a piece of code were patentable, but the last time I remember the university wielding that particular hammer with any force, the NCSA Mosaic authors left (middle fingers high in the air) to found Netscape.
I have never felt any pressure to ask anyone's permission to publish an algorithm or source code.  (My first-order research area is algorithms.)