This doesn't sound like the academics', or even administrators' fault- this is being imposed by the state university system. Reading between the lines the change is a response to political pressure to reduce costs and impose restrictions on curricula.
>Not sure why anyone wants to impose restrictions on curricula
I won't get too political, but that's the one part of this story that only got worse and more blatant over the decade since this posting.
I'm an academic at a large state university (not SUNY). Faculty, staff, and students generally have very little direct say in IT-related matters. These decisions often come down from central admin, through a process that is just as mysterious (and sometimes infuriating) to us.
I will also chime in. Having contracted with multiple large, state universities, this is the norm. Staff and faculty have little, if any, input into the systems the university uses, and are often just as confused as the rest of us.
Every institution I've worked for had a check-off for IT and central admin if software purchases were requested. These are well-known to be poison to most initiatives without a Dean level or above pushing for it.
I don't think people that criticize non-admin university employees have any idea how these things work. Not only do they not talk to the people that do the work to find out what they need, they're not open to feedback on the garbage they've cobbled together after they put it in production, and every decision is made assuming faculty, staff, and students are always wrong and they're always right. I could write a book about the things I've seen.
>> Reading between the lines the change is a response to political pressure to reduce costs and impose restrictions on curricula.
Reduce costs by spending huge amounts of money to lose capability? This smells like someone got an "incentive" to spend public (govt) money on some corporate project. Not sure why anyone wants to impose restrictions on curricula, but that'd be a kind of separate thing.