The merger—a term the two combining institutions avoided, preferring “consolidation” or “federation”—seemed 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 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—almost 60 years later.
Case Western Reserve University, in Cleveland, formed in 1967 from the merger of Case Institute of Technology and Western Reserve College. That’s 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.
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’ stories to try to answer a couple basic questions for myself:
- The vast majority of higher education mergers today are not strategic combinations of comparable institutions but absorptions of a weaker institution by a(n at least somewhat) stronger one, usually with the acquiring university eyeing a valuable, well-located piece of real estate. Have there been mergers of quasi equals in higher ed’s past?
- Mergers are extremely difficult, and relatively rare, because they almost always result in one institution (and all its constituents) subjugating their own needs and visibility to the other. Does history show us there can be another way, where everyone wins?
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.
Second, discussions about various forms of cross-institutional collaboration —on a continuum from casual partnerships to formal consortia to full-blown mergers—is common now in a way that it wasn’t even a decade ago. This month’s P3•EDU’s MAP Summit (for mergers, acquisitions and partnerships) at Virginia’s George Mason University featured scores of college presidents, provosts and others brainstorming with each other and a slew of advisers and experts.
Compare that to the event Inside Higher Ed 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 “mergers” in the title (we added “and collaboration” a few weeks before the event to try to provide cover). Some leaders told me they couldn’t 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.
Fortunately, the topic isn’t as verboten anymore.
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’s own future that stifle various forms of collaboration.
“How much autonomy is your institution willing to trade?” Marjorie Hass, president of the Council of Independent Colleges, asked during a panel called “The New Era of Collaboration in Higher Education” at the P3•EDU summit. “The answer is often almost none” was how Hass answered her own rhetorical question.
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’s fifth-largest city.
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—unwilling to acknowledge their colleges’ frailty amid financial and enrollment travails—have dithered seeking every possible alternative.
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.
What I found probably shouldn’t have surprised me, but still did.
Those who engineered the union of the Carnegie Institute of Technology and the Mellon Institute—representatives of two of the most powerful families of the 20th century—boasted that “two plus two would equal five” 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 “move into the Olympics of technical education with schools like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and California Institute of Technology,” one editor wrote. Another dubbed it “MIT on the Monongahela.”
But as ideal as the combination may have seemed in news releases at the time, it was—like many of today’s mergers—motivated in part by struggle and, well, greediness, Servos wrote. Carnegie took over a Mellon Institute that had been weakened by “more than a decade of erosion and soul-searching,” mostly because of flawed attempts to shift its business model away from applied research for industry to government-funded basic research.
The powers that be at Carnegie may have failed to recognize the vulnerable state of its new “bride,” Servos wrote, because “they were so dazzled” by “the Mellon Institute’s dowry”: its $37 million endowment (worth about 10 times that today).
Carnegie Tech officials struggled to develop a public explanation for the merger that didn’t focus purely on its own monetary advantages, Servos wrote. “I’ve started half a dozen times to write a statement,” one dean responded when President H. Guyford Stever asked for help, “and each time I came up with either nothing or platitudes.”
The marriage had its early bumps. An original plan to call the combined institution “Carnegie University” was scuttled when members of the Mellon family insisted on adding their name as well. And blending the two institutions’ 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.
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 “The Enlarged University” that produced little in the way of actual collaboration; another effort in the 1940s also failed.
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 “that sat about 90 yards apart,” Baznik says.
And foundations and corporate leaders in Cleveland—which was already beginning to shrink from its perch as one of the country’s 10 largest cities—complained about the competing requests for financial support and corporate representation on the institutions’ boards.
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—although the lack of transparency was such that “neither fully understood the other’s financial situation.” Both institutions thought they were the healthy ones in the marriage, and “each thought the other was just out for their money.”
Once the institutions merged—a term Case and Western Reserve officials unsuccessfully sought to avoid in favor of “federation”—certain things went smoothly and others less so.
Beating the odds, combining the two institutions’ faculties was surprisingly successful, Baznik says. A “constitutional convention” brought faculty members from across the two very different institutions together for a series of “very thoughtful” meetings over two-plus years, resulting in a governance structure that remains largely in place today.
Administrative steps like combining the two institutions’ completely dissimilar course numbering, payroll and retirement systems were “not harmonious at all,” Baznik says; it took into the early 1970s to create a truly combined course catalog for students, for example.
Perhaps the biggest miscalculation leaders made—raise your hand if you’re surprised!—was in failing to grasp the amount of alumni dissatisfaction. The fact that alumni on the institutions’ 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.
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. “It’s not supposed to be that way” in a merger of equals, the alum suggested.
Resentments like those die hard. When Ed Hundert became Case Western Reserve’s president in 2002, he began calling it simply “Case” (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 “Case Western” bothers them, because they referred to their alma mater as “Reserve,” not “Western.”
What lessons do I draw from yesterday’s mergers for today’s environment? Mostly that even mergers that in retrospect seem strategic and logical were in many ways “unequal,” unpopular—and very hard to pull off. That’s why mergers are likely to remain a limited rather than central strategy to addressing higher education’s economic woes.
But here’s 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.
