There’s not evidence of sites being penalized for 100’s of links comming from link farms.
This an example xxxhttp://www.cooking-culinary-arts-schools.com/resources/links.html
This webmaster has a large collection of edu sites and he’s an active member of linkexchanged.
IMO SE’s will ignore unrelated sites but there are not penalties for that reason.
Black Hatters back links is another issue.