\n<\/p>\n
The merger\u2014a term the two combining institutions avoided, preferring \u201cconsolidation\u201d or \u201cfederation\u201d\u2014seemed to make all the sense in the world. The two entities sat side by side in a major urban center, had complementary rather than competing academic missions and had discussed various forms of collaboration and combination for decades.<\/p>\n
Yet it took 80 years for the institutions to marry, and three years after the merger, their separate football teams still rumbled on Saturday afternoons. It took years to fully combine their course catalogs. And bickering about what to call the combined university continues to this day\u2014almost 60 years later.<\/p>\n
Case Western Reserve University, in Cleveland, formed in 1967 from the merger of Case Institute of Technology and Western Reserve College. That\u2019s the same year its peer two hours to the east, Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, emerged from the union of Carnegie Institute of Technology and the Mellon Institute.<\/p>\n
As a higher ed journalist (and former Clevelander), I was vaguely aware of that history, but at a time when mergers, acquisitions, consortia and other alliances are all the rage, I dug more deeply into the institutions\u2019 stories to try to answer a couple basic questions for myself:<\/p>\n
Mergers (and all the related ways colleges can formally join forces) have been on my mind recently for a few reasons. First, one of my core views is that the vast majority of colleges and universities will need to team up with peers in one way or another to continue to thrive. Few if any institutions can continue to be islands unto themselves.<\/p>\n
Second, discussions about various forms of cross-institutional collaboration \u2014on a continuum from casual partnerships to formal consortia to full-blown mergers\u2014is common now in a way that it wasn\u2019t even a decade ago. This month\u2019s P3\u2022EDU\u2019s MAP Summit (for mergers, acquisitions and partnerships) at Virginia\u2019s George Mason University featured scores of college presidents, provosts and others brainstorming with each other and a slew of advisers and experts.<\/p>\n
Compare that to the event Inside Higher Ed <\/em>staged in 2018, Joining Forces: Merger and Collaboration Strategies. It featured phenomenal content, including the then-presidents of Boston University and the former Wheelock College discussing their well-planned and -executed merger, and the leaders of St. Bonaventure University and Hilbert College explaining how their boards thwarted a merger both presidents supported. Relatively few people heard that terrific content, though. We had trouble getting institutional leaders to show up at a conference with \u201cmergers\u201d in the title (we added \u201cand collaboration\u201d a few weeks before the event to try to provide cover). Some leaders told me they couldn\u2019t show up at such a conference without raising too many questions. The most memorable moment for me was when one provost, as she asked a question, made a show of covering her name badge to hide her institutional affiliation.<\/p>\n Fortunately, the topic isn\u2019t as verboten anymore.<\/p>\n But when mergers do come up, reminders are constant about just how hard it is to overcome the combination of inertia, (sometimes unwarranted) confidence in institutional viability and the understandable desire to remain in control of one\u2019s own future that stifle various forms of collaboration.<\/p>\n \u201cHow much autonomy is your institution willing to trade?\u201d Marjorie Hass, president of the Council of Independent Colleges, asked during a panel called \u201cThe New Era of Collaboration in Higher Education\u201d at the P3\u2022EDU summit. \u201cThe answer is often almost none\u201d was how Hass answered her own rhetorical question.<\/p>\n I moderated a session at the summit about the emergence of the University of Texas at San Antonio, which resulted from blending a comprehensive university, UTSA, with the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, a medical campus. The combined institution is designed to play a fundamental role in driving the future of what is on the cusp of becoming the country\u2019s fifth-largest city.<\/p>\n That merger, which has been contemplated on and off for more than 20 years, is a rarity: Many if not most mergers in higher education are late-in-the-game decisions as an alternative to closure, after boards\u2014unwilling to acknowledge their colleges\u2019 frailty amid financial and enrollment travails\u2014have dithered seeking every possible alternative. <\/p>\n A lot of current-day analysts (me included) bemoan the fact that mergers are so rarely undertaken strategically, and I wondered whether it had ever not been thus. Hence my historical dive into two institutions most of us have always known as their merged selves, Case Western Reserve and Carnegie Mellon.<\/p>\n What I found probably shouldn\u2019t have surprised me, but still did.<\/p>\n Those who engineered the union of the Carnegie Institute of Technology and the Mellon Institute\u2014representatives of two of the most powerful families of the 20th century\u2014boasted that \u201ctwo plus two would equal five\u201d when the institutions teamed up, John Servos, a historian at Amherst College, wrote in a 1994 journal article about the merger. The new institution would \u201cmove into the Olympics of technical education with schools like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and California Institute of Technology,\u201d one editor wrote. Another dubbed it \u201cMIT on the Monongahela.\u201d<\/p>\n But as ideal as the combination may have seemed in news releases at the time, it was\u2014like many of today\u2019s mergers\u2014motivated in part by struggle and, well, greediness, Servos wrote. Carnegie took over a Mellon Institute that had been weakened by \u201cmore than a decade of erosion and soul-searching,\u201d mostly because of flawed attempts to shift its business model away from applied research for industry to government-funded basic research.<\/p>\n The powers that be at Carnegie may have failed to recognize the vulnerable state of its new \u201cbride,\u201d Servos wrote, because \u201cthey were so dazzled\u201d by \u201cthe Mellon Institute\u2019s dowry\u201d: its $37\u00a0million endowment (worth about 10 times that today).<\/p>\n Carnegie Tech officials struggled to develop a public explanation for the merger that didn\u2019t focus purely on its own monetary advantages, Servos wrote. \u201cI\u2019ve started half a dozen times to write a statement,\u201d one dean responded when President H. Guyford Stever asked for help, \u201cand each time I came up with either nothing or platitudes.\u201d<\/p>\n The marriage had its early bumps. An original plan to call the combined institution \u201cCarnegie University\u201d was scuttled when members of the Mellon family insisted on adding their name as well. And blending the two institutions\u2019 faculties was difficult: Given that the Mellon Institute had long been focused on industry research and never served students, few of its faculty showed any interest in teaching undergraduates.<\/p>\n A couple hours to the west, civic leaders in Cleveland had talked on and off for decades about how logical it would be to combine Case Institute of Technology and Western Reserve College, says Richard Baznik, university historian at Case Western Reserve. A national commission set up by the Cleveland Foundation in the 1910s published a glossy report called \u201cThe Enlarged University\u201d that produced little in the way of actual collaboration; another effort in the 1940s also failed.<\/p>\n The 1960s were a different story, stoked by significant external pressures. As both institutions sought to increase their scientific profiles during the post-Sputnik boom in federally supported research, officials at the National Science Foundation balked at the idea of funding major equipment purchases at two institutions \u201cthat sat about 90 yards apart,\u201d Baznik says.<\/p>\n And foundations and corporate leaders in Cleveland\u2014which was already beginning to shrink from its perch as one of the country\u2019s 10 largest cities\u2014complained about the competing requests for financial support and corporate representation on the institutions\u2019 boards.<\/p>\n Financial pressures also played a role. Both Case and Western Reserve had expanded significantly through the go-go years of the 1950s and were overextended, Baznik says\u2014although the lack of transparency was such that \u201cneither fully understood the other\u2019s financial situation.\u201d Both institutions thought they were the healthy ones in the marriage, and \u201ceach thought the other was just out for their money.\u201d <\/p>\n Once the institutions merged\u2014a term Case and Western Reserve officials unsuccessfully sought to avoid in favor of \u201cfederation\u201d\u2014certain things went smoothly and others less so.<\/p>\n Beating the odds, combining the two institutions\u2019 faculties was surprisingly successful, Baznik says. A \u201cconstitutional convention\u201d brought faculty members from across the two very different institutions together for a series of \u201cvery thoughtful\u201d meetings over two-plus years, resulting in a governance structure that remains largely in place today.<\/p>\n Administrative steps like combining the two institutions\u2019 completely dissimilar course numbering, payroll and retirement systems were \u201cnot harmonious at all,\u201d Baznik says; it took into the early 1970s to create a truly combined course catalog for students, for example.<\/p>\n Perhaps the biggest miscalculation leaders made\u2014raise your hand if you\u2019re surprised!\u2014was in failing to grasp the amount of alumni dissatisfaction. The fact that alumni on the institutions\u2019 governing boards recognized the wisdom of merging, Baznik says, led board leaders to mistakenly assume that their fellow alums would come along for the ride. Many did not.<\/p>\n Years after the merger, an alumnus of Case Institute of Technology asked Baznik to join him in thumbing through a booklet commemorating the merger. Page by page the alum counted how many more times the booklet referred to Western Reserve or its legacy schools or departments than to Case and its former elements. \u201cIt\u2019s not supposed to be that way\u201d in a merger of equals, the alum suggested. <\/p>\n Resentments like those die hard. When Ed Hundert became Case Western Reserve\u2019s president in 2002, he began calling it simply \u201cCase\u201d (he found the nine-syllable full name and the CWRU acronym cumbersome). That infuriated alumni of the much-larger Western Reserve College; even calling it \u201cCase Western\u201d bothers them, because they referred to their alma mater as \u201cReserve,\u201d not \u201cWestern.\u201d<\/p>\n What lessons do I draw from yesterday\u2019s mergers for today\u2019s environment? Mostly that even mergers that in retrospect seem strategic and logical were in many ways \u201cunequal,\u201d unpopular\u2014and very hard to pull off. That\u2019s why mergers are likely to remain a limited rather than central strategy to addressing higher education\u2019s economic woes.<\/p>\n But here\u2019s hoping that more boards and presidents think creatively and proactively about how they might work collectively with other institutions to further their missions, serve their students and ensure their futures. Going it alone is rarely going to suffice. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The merger\u2014a term the two combining institutions avoided, preferring \u201cconsolidation\u201d or \u201cfederation\u201d\u2014seemed to make all the sense in the world. The two entities sat side by side in a major urban center, had complementary rather than competing academic missions and had discussed various forms of collaboration and combination for decades. Yet it took 80 years<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":47666,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[23141,495,21029,10329],"class_list":{"0":"post-47665","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-column","9":"tag-higher","10":"tag-mergers","11":"tag-strategic"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47665","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=47665"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47665\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/47666"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=47665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=47665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=47665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}