How Universities Learned to Buy

Fifteen years of moving campus purchasing from paper to platform, told from the inside

Every university buys things: lab supplies, laptops, paper, chemicals, contract services. By one estimate, purchases of goods and services take about 20% of a campus operating budget, second only to payroll (EDUCAUSE). Yet for most of my career, few presidents, trustees or faculty gave buying much thought. It was a back-office task, done by people who mostly said “no.”

That changed over about fifteen years. I was on the inside of part of that change: I helped bring online purchasing systems to a health science center in Houston, later led the same work at a large flagship campus in Austin, and helped start a system-wide purchasing alliance along the way. This is the story of how it happened, told from the desk where I sat, and set against what other institutions were doing at the same time.