Strategic institutional leadership, strong government and staff participation are among the factors that are essential to successful mergers among tertiary institutions. But mergers already under way in South Africa do not show clear efficiency or financial gains, nor have they achieved greater racial or gender equity among staff and students.
These are among the findings of a new study that will soon appear in a book entitled Mergers in Higher Education: Lessons Learned in Transitional Contexts. The authors are Jonathan D Jansen, dean of the education faculty at the University of Pretoria, and five doctoral students: Denis Bandi, Mankolo Lethoko, Venitha Soobrayan (all of the University of Pretoria), Sibu Chalufu (State University of New York) and Chika Sehoole (University of the Witwatersrand).
Five mergers provided extensive data on which the study’s conclusions are based: the veterinary science faculties of Medunsa and the University of Pretoria; the South African College of Teacher Education (Sacte) and Unisa; the Giyani College of Education and the University of Venda for Science and Technology (Univen); the Natal Technikon and ML Sultan Technikon; and the Johannesburg College of Education (JCE) and the University of the Witwatersrand.
Based on these case studies, one chapter in the forthcoming book suggests seven factors constituting what matters in merger performance: strategic leadership, strong government, staff participation, strong institutions, clarity of objectives, post-merger strategy and contingency thinking. The chapter also uses these case studies to judge and explain the effects of the mergers in seven areas: equity, efficiency, curriculum, organisational structure, students, staffing and physical (that is, facilities and infrastructure).
“Merger policy is seldom merger practice,” the study found. The fate of a merger is determined rather by the interplay of macro-political (that is, the state) and micro-political forces (that is, the institutions).
“The state seldom has a free hand in determining what it wants from public institutions of higher education; similarly, the plans of institutions responding to merger pressures are seldom achieved in practice.”
What matters in mergers
For individual institutions, “the most critical factor determining the outcome of a merger is the quality and capacity of the leadership that is put in place to steer the merger process”, the study says. “Leaders who are pre-occupied with their own personal careers cannot serve institutions well in a merger process.”
But weak leadership is equally problematic, and “would invariably damn the lesser institution going into the merger”. In the cases of Giyani College, Sacte, Technikon Natal and Medunsa’s veterinary school, “there was no strong, visible and respected leadership that could make the demands on the merger partner that would strengthen the hand of the weaker institution”.
By contrast, exceptionally strong leadership at JCE directed favourable terms for the college’s incorporation into Wits. It remained physically intact as a unit, circumscribed the use of its reserves for purposes of teacher education, and negotiated professorships for its senior staff.
In the five mergers, “the institutions that enjoyed relative success, like JCE, were ones that accepted the broad terms of merger and incorporation and then positioned their institutions for optimal benefits in the newly envisaged structure. The longer the leadership resisted the very notion of merger, the weaker the position on the institution,” the study found.
Unisa, which is currently mounting a legal challenge to proposals that it merge with Technikon SA and Vista University’s Distance Education Centre, might be a case in point, the study suggests: “The longer the institution delays the incorporation process … the longer it creates tension, confusion and dissent within and outside of the institution — weakening its overall bargaining position and attractiveness when the merger actually happens.”
Strong government matters in mergers, the study concludes. “Without government intervention at critical moments in the life cycle of the only voluntary merger studied [that of the two technikons], it is quite likely that the decade-long merger discussions would still be unresolved, even stalled.”
No institutions, other than the two technikons, would have contemplated mergers without government direction. “The essence of strong government seems to be knowing when to intervene and when to hold back; when to direct and when to nurture; when to consult and when to decide.”
Without staff participation and support, no merger will flourish. “The institutions that provided clear, open, frequent and honest communication to all staff were able to rely on this support base during negotiations.” The study cites JCE again as exemplary in this respect.
But “institutions that ignored their staff not only lost the most talented even before conclusion of the negotiations, but found it very difficult to regain the support, interest and motivation of the personnel when attention shifted to the routines of academic and administrative functions”.
Strong institutions going into a merger do so with a clear advantage, the study found. Institutions that are weak because of declining financial status or student enrolments are vulnerable to merger, closure or incorporation within an institution (for example, a weak academic department) or with other institutions (for example, a weak university).
“Dramatic changes in institutional policy or government policy would expose such academic units,” the study says. “The implication is that building strong institutions, with strong leadership, is a prerequisite for survival in changing or transitional environments. In every case studied, strong institutions mattered.”
A striking finding of the study is that clear outcomes for the mergers were rarely set. “The fact that a merger had to be accomplished was clear; why exactly this was necessary (beyond governmental or legal requirement) was not known or clear to any of the stakeholders involved.”
There must be a shift from “process and compliance” to “outcomes and performance” as measurable attributes of any merger process. Without these, “mergers might amount to little more than the reorganisation of institutions rather than the transformation of such institutions”.
Equally, “post-merger strategy matters”, the study says. What happens after a merger becomes a legal reality is critical in determining the “contours and consequences” of that merger. The lack of such strategy resulted partly from a lack of clear objectives. “While some institutions settled for transitional plans (that is, temporary arrangements for finalisation at a later date), this might not translate into new and sustainable plans — given the real possibility that transitional plans could become institutionalised in short periods of time.”
The study’s “single most important finding” was “the lack of contingent thinking” in all the institutions involved in the five mergers, with the exception of the two technikons. None of the others had ever contemplated mergers. “Even institutions that experienced severe difficulties in terms of finances or enrolments were quite content to roll along or, worse, expect official tolerance or bailout from the status quo.”
Universities banked on autonomy, the study found; colleges on the inherent value of professional education; and the veterinary faculties on their uniqueness as training facilities. But if institutions “learn to think contingently, then the merger experiences of the late 1990s and early 2000s might better prepare them for the reality and inevitability of change.”
As a response to declining resource levels and student enrolments, such thinking might prepare institutions for mergers and other forms of substantial partnerships more readily than to date.
The outcomes of mergers
In none of the five mergers was any greater racial or gender equity achieved. “The belief among merger advocates, including government, that mergers create stronger equity effects must be debunked,” the study says. “There is no empirical grounding for such an expectation.”
Secondly, efficiency gains were not clearly evident in any of the mergers. The study notes, though, that “in any merger, the first victim is data”, and this made it very difficult to estimate efficiency effects. Even so, the study concludes: “There is simply no evidence, at various stages of the mergers, that money was saved as a result of the merger process.”
The study found that the mergers had mixed effects on the institutions’ curriculums. In the case of Sacte and Giyani, their curriculums simply dissipated because of “the politics of neglect and indifference” on the part of their merger partners. But in the case of JCE, the curriculum was actually buttressed. “What was critical in the contestations over curriculum,” the study found, “and therefore over the degree of curriculum integration, was micro-political struggles over whose content matters.”
Conscious political decisions about the accommodation (or non-accommodation) of one of the merger partners determined the degree of organisational integration. For example, in the cases of Sacte and Giyani, the stronger institution ignored the college structure or organisation and simply absorbed student numbers (and therefore added subsidy). With the technikons, the organisational effects remain an open question. Macro-political and micro-political decisions determine organisational arrrangements.
Students have surprisingly little effect on mergers, the study says. “In fact, student politics was largely ignored” in the merger processes. The lack of a strong tradition of student politics in the college sector played a part; as did the lack of student organisation to contest mergers. But in the JCE case, students had little to be worried about anyway: they “enjoyed protection in the insulated organisational arrangements provided”.
The picture regarding staff was vastly different: “mergers were “devastating for the emotional and professional lives of all staff, at all levels … Careers ended abruptly, or were suddenly redirected in ways that were traumatic for the affected staff.”
But the principle finding on merger outcomes was that “physical integration is the most complex, messy and draw-out component of mergers in transitional contexts”. In addition, “the range of factors that determine the degree of ‘physical integration’ is so broad and contentious that no simple or straightforward finding can be made given both legal and political uncertainties about physical site ownership”.