That building is on the edge of the City of London campus. Most of the students there couldn’t tell you much about St. George’s University of London if you asked them last year. That changed in 2024, when both institutions said they were going to join together. Suddenly, two very different academic worlds were being asked to merge: one based on business, law, and engineering, and the other on medicine and health care.
This is the kind of news that gets a paragraph in the business press and a longer, more tense conversation in the common areas of colleges.
An awful lot of pressure is being put on universities in the UK all at the same time. Government money has become less available. The number of students studying some subjects has gone down. It costs a lot more now than it did ten years ago to run a wide range of academic programs. In this situation, mergers and acquisitions are appearing less like a last resort and more like a well-thought-out plan—a way to combine resources, boost research, and maintain a competitive edge in a world market that is getting more and more crowded.
But researchers keep coming back to the same point: the reasons for university mergers are not the same as those for corporate mergers. When two businesses join together, they usually want to gain market share or save money. A university that merges with another school is trying to do all of those things while also protecting academic freedom, the student experience, and whatever it was about each school that made it worth going to in the first place. That’s not something that can be shown on a spreadsheet.
The University of Manchester and UMIST’s merger in 2004 is likely the most studied example of this kind of change in British higher education, and for good reason. It mostly worked. The new institution became better known for its research around the world and produced more in ways that neither university could have done on their own. But the way there wasn’t easy. Manchester was a traditional research university that had been around for hundreds of years. UMIST focused on technology and had a more vocational feel to it. Getting those two cultures to live together took years of careful management and, according to most reports, an understanding of what staff and students on both sides had to lose.
The merger of City and St. George’s in 2024 has similar fault lines, though they might be more noticeable. Putting together the cultures of a law school, a business school, and a medical school isn’t just an administrative exercise, that much is clear. Different types of people are drawn to these fields because they think and work in different ways. Based on research on higher education mergers, this is exactly where things go wrong: not with the money, but with blending the cultures. Institutions hold on to traditions that are up to hundreds of years old. If leaders aren’t clear about what’s changing and what isn’t, resentment can grow quickly when these traditions clash.
People often don’t think about managing stakeholders until there is a problem. Faculty members worry about keeping their jobs and the independence of their departments. Students are worried about how good their degrees will be. What will happen to the name on their certificate after the merger? Partners from outside the company, like industry groups, government agencies, and research funders, want to know who they’re dealing with now. It takes a lot of work to keep all of those groups informed and involved, not just informed. Research has shown over and over that institutions that talk to people often and honestly build a lot more trust than those that make an announcement first and then explain later.
It’s still not clear if the merger of City and St. George’s will be seen as a success or a lesson learned. The research shows that the answer will depend less on the decision’s financial sense, which makes sense on paper, and more on whether the leaders can keep two very different institutional identities together while creating something truly new. That’s the part that press releases never really explain. But that part is the most important.
