Windows 95 runs very nicely with 16 Meg. It would probably be unwise to try it with less than 8 Meg. In student labs they may need 32 Meg, since they are mainly using diskless machines. But with a local disk for paging, most users will find 16Meg quite adequate. Windows 95 runs nicely on 486 processors.
Newer software tends to demand more of the machine.
But if you are using software that runs well on something less than a pentium, it should run just as well with Windows 95 as with your present operating system. With older machines, the graphic display limitations, and the disk speed may be more of a problem than is the processor speed. If you want all of the faculty to have the very latest computer equipment available to them at all times, there is an easy way to accomplish that.