Perspective · Higher Education · June 18, 2026
The campus system nobody owns
Every university has one: the system three offices depend on and none is responsible for. Ownership is a design decision, and it is never too late to make it.
Every campus has the system. The portal from two leadership teams ago. The integration between the student information system and the LMS that one analyst understands. The data feed the registrar, financial aid, and institutional research all depend on and all assume someone else maintains.
Universities are built as federations: schools, departments, and administrative units with real autonomy. That structure has strengths. Clear ownership of shared systems is not one of them. Anything that crosses unit lines tends to belong to everyone, which in practice means no one.
Ownership is a design decision
The fix is not another committee. It is a named owner with a budget and the authority to say no: a portfolio view of shared systems, a funding model that does not depend on goodwill, and a service catalog that states plainly who runs what. None of this is glamorous. All of it is decidable in a semester.
Modernize the boring layer first
When modernization money arrives, the temptation is the visible thing: a new portal, a new mobile app. The durable move is the layer underneath: identity, integrations, and data definitions that agree across units. Get those right and every later project ships faster. Skip them and the new portal becomes the next system nobody owns.
A system nobody owns is a risk everybody shares.
Public institutions carry one more constraint: procurement cycles measured in years. A phased plan with named ownership and an explicit transfer of operations to campus IT is not just good engineering. It is what review boards fund, because it reads as a plan to become unnecessary rather than a plan to stay.
