General help

Here's what I found after a google search:

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Your site may not have the cron set up at all. In this case you will see this message on the "Site administration" - "Notifications" page:

The cron.php maintenance script has not been run for at least 24 hours. *This is what I see when I go to Notifications.*

If this is the case, you should get this configured as soon as possible. Comprehensive instructions are available from https://docs.moodle.org/28/en/Cron.

If you are setting this up for the first time you may wish to add the following line to "config.php" (or just above the "?>" if it's present) for the first run:

$CFG->noemailever = true;

This will prevent any email being generated which, for an existing site that has had no cron running could prevent a lot of out-of-date and unwanted email. Don't forget to remove the line after you have got cron working."

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From what I understand, users will get a lot of outdated emails if I set up cron now through the Scheduled tasks page without adding this line to that php file. The university's IT team does not know about this, either, I guess, or they would have set up cron when they moved the site to the new server and upgraded to Moodle 3.2.

How can I access that php file?

I would get your server admin to check it. If you want a guess... they set it up wrongly (i.e. it doesn't work) but 'tested' the cron command line manually once. That's the one you see that worked. 

It'll be something like that.