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Mergers

My university announced plans earlier this week to merge with another university in a different part of our state. I've been there, it's nice although less than half as big as we are. There are tons of issues to work out before it is approved but our community is trying to take in what our trustees worked on in secret over the summer.

As with most colleges and universities we've seen for a while the demographics coming----the continual increase in students of age to go to university is finally backing off. Coming after the damage that the COVID pandemic did, a lot of schools are hurting financially. We are in a good position:  no unnecessary hiring, budgets cut, but no layoffs.

The school we are merging with took a bad hit from the pandemic, and are trustees feel expanding into this part of the state and pooling our risk (both of us are heavily dependent on tuition) will keep us sound going into the next century.

Right now all of the discussion has been about finances, legal approvals, etc. My main interest is curricular, how our two missions to serve our students will align in the nuts and bolts. It feels as if there will be a stage when that discussion is appropriate (not yet) but that if we blink it will be assumed that we have no input to offer.

A bigger long-term concern is that if the trustees put themselves publicly in support of this merger that by the time approval is sought from the DOE (with Linda McMahon, a former WWF executive and Trump ultra-fan) we may get pressure to lessen/stop our diversity initiatives.  While bigger schools such as Harvard and Columbia have gotten the headlines for resisting/caving in to pressure from Trump to passively lie about race and gender in this country, so have many other schools. We already are speaking less loudly about such issues on our campus for fear of retribution. So, yeah, the fear is very real.

I've got retirement coming in less than a decade, so I'm one of the senior folk without as much to lose. I'm not going to be promoted any further and if I stop getting merit pay raises we'll be okay.  In campus politics the trick is always knowing when to spend your political capital, and right now I'm working to get the administration to address deferred maintenance issues on campus. I don't have much power other than being senior and being faculty ombudsperson but I've got a loud voice at faculty meetings; the trick is always knowing when to use it.

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