Having worked in the higher ed vertical, I've interacted with a lot of college IT groups. The clownish appearance of IT in higher education has much less to do

Having worked in the higher ed vertical, I've interacted with a lot of college IT groups. The clownish appearance of IT in higher education has much less to do with the people in the IT (though there is a higher-than-industry-standard proportion of those, there are also some of the most dedicated and smarted people I've had the privilege to work with) and much more to do with the structure of higher education in general. Every single major IT decision in a campus has to be sold to the faculty senate, which is the organization that really wields the power of the organization. Unfortunately, if you don't have IT management who are amazing sales people, you get decisions that are all about "will this make the grant I'm proposing tomorrow easier or harder". There are very few centralized IT projects, because it is such a nightmare to get approval across campus. Instead, every department solves the problems for themselves and expects IT to cobble everything together. And almost nobody gives a flying fart about the students and what they see of this mess. Given students today were born very shortly before the Internet went "mainstream" is a major issue and smart schools with strong central control (there are some...) are using it as a differentiator for student prospects.