Cultural Factors in Higher Education Mergers: the Australian Experience

Abstract

I want to talk about cultural factors in higher education mergers, particulaarly alluding to mergers in Australia. I think you'll be very interested in the cultural dimensions, both good and bad. While merger as a policy issue in public higher education has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention, very little attention has been paid to merger as a cultural issue. And given the impact that culture has on all of institutional life, this is really very surprising. So I decided that it was time to address that problem and to look more closely at the cultural dimension. The importance of culture in the merger process should never be underestimated because if it is ignored or not managed very well and with a lot of sensitivity, the impact on the morale and loyalty of staff can be devastating. I want to illustrate the power and the influence of culture by providing some examples of higher education institutions arising from mergers in Australia from the late 1980s on, and the cultural challenge that arose as institutional leaders tried to create integrated communities from the merging of cultures that were sometimes very different historically and symbolically. I'll give you some good examples of where successful integration has been achieved but also where academic cultures collided, so becoming a very potent disintigrative force.