The Leaders Who Navigate Mergers Are Not Failures. They Are Among the Best We Have.
Brian Weinblatt, Ph.D., CFRE
Founder and Principal, Higher Ed Consolidation Solutions
A response to "What Legal and Other Help Do You Actually Need in Mergers, Acquisitions, and Partnerships?"
Dr. Barry Ryan's recent piece on the professional support institutions need during mergers, acquisitions, and strategic partnerships is worth reading carefully, especially coming from someone who lived this work firsthand through the Woodbury University process. Leaders who step into transformational moments of that scale rarely get enough credit for what they actually navigate. I want to start there, because it matters.
He is right that experienced legal counsel is essential. Full stop. The regulatory, governance, accreditation, employment, and transactional complexities of higher education combinations are simply not navigable without it.
But I want to extend the conversation because, in my experience, institutions consistently misunderstand where the greatest risks actually lie in these processes. And that misunderstanding can be costly.
The Hardest Parts Are Rarely Legal
Legal documents don't fail. Transactions fail.
They fail because the wrong partners were identified in the first place. Because governance cultures turned out to be incompatible in ways nobody surfaced during diligence. Because faculty governance dynamics were underestimated. Because the announcement was sequenced badly and created fear before trust could be established. Because the implementation burden was never seriously modeled.
These are not legal problems. They are strategic, operational, cultural, and communications problems, and they frequently determine whether a technically sound transaction actually works.
Effective partner identification alone is far more complex than most institutions appreciate. It is not a matter of generating a list of institutions with overlapping geographies or comparable enrollment profiles. Real partner evaluation requires a deep assessment of mission compatibility, governance culture, academic complementarity, financial positioning, enrollment realities, leadership chemistry, political feasibility, and long-term strategic alignment. Institutions that look logical on paper sometimes prove deeply incompatible operationally. Others that seem unconventional at first glance can create transformational strategic opportunities precisely because of complementary strengths.
Due diligence is similarly misunderstood. Institutions tend to think of it primarily as a legal and financial exercise. In reality, some of the most consequential diligence questions are operational and cultural:
Can these cultures realistically integrate? Are governance expectations aligned? Will academic structures complement or conflict? Are technology systems compatible? How will faculty respond? What implementation burdens are being systematically underestimated? Where are the political landmines nobody is naming out loud?
Communications strategy is another area that gets dramatically underweighted. The sequencing and framing of merger announcements are among the most sensitive moments a campus community will experience. A poorly managed announcement can generate fear, distrust, and organizational resistance almost immediately, even when the underlying transaction is strategically sound. Thoughtful communication planning can do the opposite: build credibility, sustain momentum, and preserve institutional trust during periods of profound change.
These capabilities don't fit neatly into a legal engagement. They require people who have operated inside institutions during transformational moments, who understand what a board chair is actually worried about at midnight, what a provost needs to hear before they can get behind something, and what a faculty senate will do if they feel they've been managed rather than consulted.
The Question the Field Keeps Getting Wrong
Dr. Ryan's article raises a question I think deserves much more serious attention in higher education:
What if you get it right?
That question sounds simple. It is actually quite radical, because the dominant narrative in our sector treats mergers, affiliations, and acquisitions almost entirely as emergency measures, things institutions do when they have run out of other options, evidence of strategic failure dressed up in the language of transformation.
That framing deserves to be challenged.
The most successful higher education combinations are not built around institutional survival. They are built around institutional possibility. When done well, combinations can produce something neither institution could have built independently: broader academic offerings, stronger enrollment infrastructure, deeper faculty expertise, greater geographic reach, expanded student opportunity, and a fundamentally different competitive position in the market.
Some of the most successful higher education combinations over the past several decades demonstrate exactly this dynamic. The University of Toledo and the Medical University of Ohio created a comprehensive research university with a scale, health sciences footprint, and competitive position neither institution could have achieved independently. The creation of the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus fundamentally reshaped the university's research and health sciences profile. The Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences affiliation with Russell Sage College expanded academic opportunity and institutional reach for both institutions. These institutions did not simply stabilize. They repositioned themselves entirely, changing their peer set, expanding their reach, and building something neither could have achieved alone.
The irony is that higher education often celebrates transformational outcomes while remaining deeply uncomfortable with the transformational decisions required to achieve them.
That is not failure. That is strategic leadership at the highest level.
The Leaders We Should Be Talking About Differently
Which brings me to the argument I think the field needs to have more openly.
Many presidents and institutional leaders approach merger conversations with a quiet, legitimate fear: that pursuing a combination, even a strategically sound one, will be read as a signal that they failed to keep their institution viable on their own.
I understand that fear. I also think it is based on a fundamental misreading of what these processes actually require.
Successfully leading a complex institutional transformation demands a combination of leadership capabilities that is genuinely rare: strategic vision, political judgment, board leadership, communications discipline, negotiation skill, operational fluency, emotional intelligence, and the resilience to hold an institution together during a period of profound uncertainty. These are not the tools of a leader presiding over decline. They are the tools of a leader operating at the outer edge of institutional complexity.
Very few people in higher education ever develop those tools, because very few situations demand them.
Leaders who successfully navigate transformational combinations at this level, bringing institutions through these processes with their missions intact, their communities respected, and their futures genuinely strengthened, emerge with one of the rarest leadership credentials in higher education: demonstrated experience leading institutional transformation. As demographic, financial, and competitive pressures continue to reshape the sector, that experience is becoming more valuable, not less.
Successfully leading a merger is not typically career-ending.
Very often, it is career-defining.
What This Work Actually Requires
Every institutional transaction requires experienced legal counsel. The legal architecture of a merger, acquisition, or affiliation cannot be built without it. That is not a question of preference or budget. It is a structural reality.
The question worth asking is what else is required, and whether institutions are assembling the full range of capabilities the work actually demands. Legal expertise addresses what the transaction must accomplish. Strategic, operational, cultural, and communications expertise addresses whether it will actually work. Both matter. They are not substitutes for each other.
The institutions that get this right are usually the ones that stop asking "what kind of help do we legally need?" and start asking "what capabilities do we actually need to do this well?"
The distinction matters more than most people realize, usually right around the moment when a transaction that looked clean on paper starts to get complicated.
Dr. Ryan and I would probably agree on more than we'd disagree. The work he describes from his Woodbury experience reflects exactly the kind of leadership that deserves broader recognition.
Higher education mergers and affiliations are not transactions to be documented. They are institutional transformations to be led.
And the leaders who lead them well deserve a different story than the one they too often get.