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As Edsger Dijkstra said, "Simplicity is a prerequisite for reliability", yet in today's IT architectural landscape, simplicity has become a distant speck in our rearview mirror. Vendor software solutions provide easy on-ramps for solutions to meet our customer’s needs, with the hidden cost of unbridled complexity. Often this complexity is of the worst kind: it is both accidental (not central to the problems we are trying to solve) and outside of our control - and this complexity is crushing us. This talk is intended to be a polemic on the University of the Future and the challenges we face. I do not want to merely attack our reliance on vendors and their solutions. Rather I want to foster a discussion on the opportunities for a new partnership, where the Universities’ information technology professionals are able to articulate the core principles that are essential to our institutions. We need to be the ones who deeply understand the meaning in the information we shepherd, and how to ensure its lasting value into the future, with a design vision that focuses on simplicity. In this talk I will give some examples of work to address the challenge, however this should also be an open discussion on the problem and possible solutions.