Ricardo Azziz has held numerous executive positions in higher education and led the merger that resulted in Georgia Regents University, now Augusta University. He is principal at Strategic Partnerships in Higher Education, or SPH, Consulting Group.
He writes the regular Merger Watch opinion series on corporate restructuring in higher education.
I was recently speaking to a college leader who had courageously helped lead an institutional merger, all while knowing that he was deliberately working himself out of a job. The leader in question reminded me that he found truth in an oft-repeated business proverb: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”
While dealing with the mechanics of the merger was difficult, he said addressing cultural factors was much more challenging.
And while I agreed, I couldn’t help but question this statement.
That’s partly because I am the product of two academics — one a nuclear physicist and the other a cultural anthropologist — who often worked in the same university but whose academic approaches and personalities could not be more distinct. Moreover, I led the merger of a health sciences university with a liberal arts university — two institutions with long, deep histories and extraordinarily different cultures. In the 13-plus years since that merger, the university has had consistent enrollment growth and has increased its research funding.
The focus on culture, which requires careful and deliberate consideration and action, is a prudent one. But does culture always trump strategy? Probably not.
Before I elaborate, what is institutional culture anyway?
While administrative leaders must understand a college’s culture, a campus’s identity “is not often easily definable,” higher education scholars William Tierney and Michael Lanford wrote in 2020.
In a 2025 book I coauthored with three other higher education experts, we noted that the leaders of mergers, closures and other major institutional restructuring “will do well to remember that ‘how’ and ‘what’ one ‘sees’ is culturally determined. Groups may not merely ‘perceive’, but actually ‘see’ things differently.”
In other words, institutional culture is defined by the beliefs and perspectives of the individuals composing the institution. Change the people making up the organization, change the culture — a well-tested, but extraordinarily disruptive, tactic in change management.
Tierney and Lanford wrote that “institutional culture in higher education is perhaps most apparent when individuals move to a new campus environment after spending a significant amount of time at a single college or university.” Put differently, only when the individuals at colleges face a new set of beliefs and values, as is most dramatically apparent in a merger of institutions, can we observe what their current or future culture really speaks to. We can best and most accurately define the details of a college’s culture when we juxtapose it to another institution’s workings.
That’s why it’s critical to understand — as best as possible, without criticism or censure — the cultural workings of other institutions before considering a major strategic partnership or merger with them. This helps modulate and manage how strategy is implemented without necessarily determining the strategy itself.
Does culture play a stronger role in higher ed than in other industries?
The success of mergers in industries other than higher education may rest as much, or even more, on culture as it does on strategy. A large share of mergers are not successful, with cultural differences often pointed to as a reason. In many of those industries, employees’ cultural fit or misalignment is more likely to directly and rapidly impact the organization’s bottom line.
Hence, culture may be more important to mergers in other sectors than in higher education. Further, there is little doubt that mergers in higher education are quite different from mergers in other industry sectors due to college governance structures, employment contracts and compensation, missions and other key metrics.
Is it true you can’t mix institutional cultures?
No, because it would assume that colleges intrinsically have homogenous cultures. Most colleges actually have very heterogeneous cultures defined by the many individuals that make them up.
The coaches in the athletics department support a different culture from that of the nursing faculty. The faculty in the math department have a different culture than those in the law school. In fact, most institutions of higher education embrace a diversity of cultures associated with the plethora of disciplines under their roofs.
Hence, it is not true that you cannot mix cultures in higher education, either through the internal development of different disciplines — for instance, by establishing a medical, dental, or law school — or through a merger. In fact, most institutions already have, embrace and manage heterogeneous campus cultures.
To be clear, we should recognize that most institutions’ faculty and staff do hold shared values, defined by mission, history, traditions, faculty promotion and tenure policies, and target student population. In many ways, that defines the culture of the institution.
Smaller institutions with fewer disciplines and academic offerings are also more likely to have community members who hold similar views and perspectives. Thus, a merger of institutions requires a deliberate and proactive process to understand, empathize with, and help preserve old traditions, values, and narratives, while simultaneously building new ones.
Is a merger of institutions with different cultures sure to fail?
No, as the combinations of the Georgia Health Sciences University and Augusta State University, Mills College and Northeastern University, Delaware State University and Wesley College, and many others show, mergers of very different institutions can be successful. However, the success of a merger critically depends on the strategic vision and purpose behind the combination.
In the merger of colleges and universities, cultural discordance will certainly ruin your breakfast if not taken into careful, deliberate and proactive consideration. But it does not trump a well-thought-through strategy, which should already take into account cultural dissonance on its way to taking the institution to a better, stronger and more future-oriented place.
