English is not my native language, so I initially misread it as being founded by cadets in 1828. That seemed strange to me, so I had to read the sentence again before I figured out the actual meaning.
English is my native language, and your reading is correct. It's badly written. English is not a high-context language; you shouldn't have to know that the university was not founded by cadets for the sentence to be clear, so the "26 years after the academy's founding" part should have been a subordinate clause, separated by a comma.
Just to add to this:
It's my observation as a layman (not a linguist) that over the past half-century, commas seem to have gone out of vogue for some strange reason, so a lot of contemporary English writing has become much more difficult to parse as a result. This line we're discussing here is a great example of this.