Universities serve as engines of social and cultural development, acting as centers of teaching and learning and influencing regional growth and environmental transformation. They also play a critical role in advancing sustainable development, including the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and broader sustainability agendas. However, university operations, management, and curriculum are often misaligned with sustainability goals established, thus requiring analyses of such a disconnection and exploration of potential solutions. This study identified and categorized internal and external factors that facilitate or hinder the alignment of university operations and curriculum with SDGs, focusing on the University of São Paulo (USP). It is based on a comprehensive literature review that identified sustainability-related factors in the context of university operations and curriculum. The factors were filtered and structured through a Sustainability SWOT analysis (S-SWOT), which integrates sustainability considerations into the traditional SWOT framework. S-SWOT framework proved a valuable tool for identifying key internal and external elements that influence USP’s sustainability initiatives and offered a structured approach for evaluations of how the initiatives align with global sustainability goals. The analysis identified 109 factors across the categories of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats mapped to USP’s 11 Thematic Environmental Policies (TEPs). According to the results, whereas some environmental policies are exclusive to operational domains (e.g., water and effluents), others are curriculum-centered (e.g., environmental education). The study also highlighted the way SDGs intersect with TEPs and showed their distribution across university operations, curriculum, or both.