One of the things about Research Universities in particular is that there's always weird custom stuff everywhere. Thus "But why isn't it standard?" is a very st

One of the things about Research Universities in particular is that there's always weird custom stuff everywhere. Thus "But why isn't it standard?" is a very stupid question. Doing the same things over and over but expecting different results isn't research it's insanity. So they're doing non-standard things because that's the whole point. There are systems that are "just" ordinary corporate stuff. Finance are not researching whether to pay suppliers, HR are not researching whether work contracts exist. But a lot of the organisation at any time is engaged in research, otherwise you're just a teaching university and to some extent that can actually be standardized and is the worse for it.