Giving up the CMS would have to be #HigherEd first step into #IndieWeb

Most universities in #HigherEd have their general web strategy all wrong. The "canonical url" should be light weight. A predictable and accessible navigation with fewest pages  possible that render HTML from databases that faculty populate (Yes classic garbage in, garbage out, but that is a supervision problem and not a technical one).

Faculty and departments shouldn't run web pages. Leads to self imposed disinformation,  and university websites running hundreds and hundreds of pages long get more and more useless for students and perspectives.

Keep your main website light. Maybe headless, no CMS.

Then develop common stylesheets that have some basic things folks might use like tables, cards, call out boxes, etc . Make a few template pages. Or use a CMS. It doesn't matter. These subdomains are not the official record. Allow faculty and departments to then run subdomains with the explicit policy you link to the main website when discussing stuff like programs, faculty, etc.

Heck maybe you could even make some of the APIs available to clubs on campus or Computer Science and see what kind of apps students could build or discoveries they could find in the data.