If you work with or within universities, you know that building applications to support higher education is not for the faint of heart. We’re dealing with legacy systems, homegrown access management and of course limited resources and endless demands from the academic community. But I’m not here to scare you! Instead we’ll talk about how to defeat the higher-ed hydra with WordPress features like multisite, roles and capabilities, theme frameworks, and the REST API. All of these were used and abused to wrangle formidable foes like Boston University and the Harvard Graduate School of Design. In this talk we’ll go through some strategies and examples that might work for you.