Web Governance for Research Universities
Notes on the operating practices, organizational design, and quiet protocols that keep institutional websites coherent, accurate, and findable across the years their content will actually live online.
Most institutional websites are built once and governed never. The consequence — visible to anyone who has searched for a faculty member, a research center, or an admissions deadline at an R1 university — is a patchwork of authoritative, abandoned, and quietly-incorrect pages indistinguishable from the outside. The cost of this incoherence used to be borne by patient users; it is now borne, increasingly, by the institution itself, as generative engines weight consistency, currency, and provenance more heavily than any ranking signal that preceded them.
This pillar is where I’ll write about governance as an operational craft: not the bureaucratic kind, with its standards committees and approval matrices, but the kind that asks who is responsible for what, on what cadence, with what authority to deprecate. Pieces will land here as I write them.