A website at a university can be a rather large project. Often times more than one person will be working on the site at any given time.
There may be a need to have different people involved with the site who serve different functions. Some people are strictly interested in contributing content, while other people serve more of an architectural or administrative capacity. These different types of people fill different Roles within the site.
All OSU Drupal 7 sites have two basic roles that can not be removed:
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anonymous
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This is the general public. They either do not have an account on the site or they are not logged in to the site
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authenticated user
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This is a person who has an account on the site and is logged in to that account
Additionally, all OSU Drupal 7 sites come with four default roles:
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group user
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This role is for people who will be working inside of groups
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author
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This role is for people who need to enter content sitewide
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manager
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This role is for people who are responsible for the management of people and content on a site. This role can do everything that an author can do but can also add users to the site and create custom roles and permission sets.
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architect
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This role is for someone who needs to work in an architectural capacity - i.e. a "site builder". This person can do everything that an author can do, but they can also add and remove users from the site, work with structural elements such as Custom Content Types, Blocks, Features, and Views, and perform global site configuration. This role should only be given to people who are familiar with Drupal site configuration as this role can cause catastrophic changes to sites with relative ease.
Sometimes a site might require a different kind of role, though, that can perform a different combination of functions. A site's manager or architect can create custom roles and permission sets, as needed, to get the job done.