The reliable evaluation of financial performance of universities plays an important role in sustainable development of universities, and it could be regarded as a multicriteria group decision making problem. Based on this, in this paper, with respect to the attribute evaluation values are expressed by interval 2‐tuple Pythagorean fuzzy linguistic variables, we develop an extended MULTIMOORA method. First, we propose the interval 2‐tuple Pythagorean fuzzy linguistic set based on Pythagorean fuzzy set and interval‐valued 2‐tuple linguistic variables, and further introduce the score and accuracy functions and Hamming distance of it. Then, considering that there are some deficiencies in the traditional MULTIMOORA method, such as exist the case of circular reasoning, and so forth. We improve it by proposing a comprehensive integration approach, which can not only consider both the utility values and sort results, but also reflect the preference attitude of decision makings simultaneously. Based on these research findings, an interval 2‐tuple Pythagorean fuzzy linguistic MULTIMOORA method is presented and the calculation process of this method is described in detail. Finally, we give the numerical example concerning the evaluation of financial management performance in universities to illustrate practicability and reliability of the proposed approach and compare the proposed method with different methods to perform its flexibility.