A Conversation about Higher Education Mergers: Part One

Dr. Eileen Hulme, Professor in the Department of Higher Education at Azusa Pacific University and Credo Affiliate, has over twenty years' experience in higher education and adaptive change research. She took time out of her rigorous teaching schedule to sit down to interview Susan Henking, the 14th and final president of Shimer College.

Susan Henking led the innovative effort to situation Shimer as Shimer Great Books School of North Central College, bringing together two great institutions. Today she serves on the advisory council of the North West College of the Liberal Arts and is on the board of the bulletin for the study of religion. Susan received her B.A. from Duke University and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago Divinity School. She has been a frequent blog contributor for the Huffington Post and Chicago Now. Currently her focus remains on supporting various types of institutions within the US higher education landscape including micro colleges, which are institutions that enroll under 600 students.

Here is part one of their conversation about higher education mergers.

Professor Eileen Hulme opens the conversation with Susan Henking by setting the stage for the topic at hand: “Today we will explore the intricacies of leading a significant change effort and the role in micro colleges in the higher education landscape. So, welcome Susan, thanks so much for your time today.”

Diving right in, Dr. Hulme asks Dr. Henking, “What prepared you for that particular presidency at Shimer?”

Dr. Henking responds: “I am a graduate of the University of Chicago. My first teaching was in the undergraduate common core there, which showed a lot with the intellectual work of the curriculum that Shimer College had. So that’s part of what prepared me, as did my other classroom experiences at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. In terms of the leadership trajectory, that work included campus work such as serving as an interim provost at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and also some national work with organizations like HERS, the preeminent leadership development group in the United States and also serving as an ACE Fellow at the Pennsylvania State System of higher education. I had an intellectual trajectory that led me to the very specific tiny college, Shimer College. I went there directly from serving as a faculty member.  It’s a very unusual thing to do that but it’s also the case that Shimer is a very unusual place.

Dr. Hulme responds, “So many things we could follow up on there but let’s first focus on the acquisition, I suppose we might call it, of Shimer College by North Central College. What precipitated that move?”

Dr. Henking: “You know, it is the case that the period of American higher education that we’re in is like some other periods, when there’s a lot of competition in the marketplace, to put it in business terms. Mergers and acquisitions become one way of dealing with the fact that there’s a few too many institutions for the number of potential students out there. We may remember from the 1970s, Case and Western become Case Western, Carnegie and Mellon become Carnegie Mellon. Right now we’re seeing lots of mergers and acquisitions and that’s primarily because they tend to be for a combination of financial and admission reasons.

"For Shimer, as a tiny micro college that was financially quite precarious, the real question was how might we best pursue our mission in the rest of the 21st century? And it was very important to us that we find a solution that meant that our students were not constantly worried that the place was going to close. Our inability to raise our enrollment past a certain level, and frankly the generosity of a lot of friends in the Chicago area who were interested in having conversations about the possibility of acquiring us, meant that we got to explore this, find a great partner, and do what was best for students, faculty and others. It allowed the faculty to have a somewhat more stable life, possibly with better pay and better benefits, students to be both less anxious and financially supported in a more substantive way. It basically solved all the financial problems while allowing the mission to continue. In many ways, if I answer bluntly, it’s finances, but it’s never only finances. It’s how are we going to best sustain our mission coming into the future, and frankly Shimer had already rejected in the past certain solutions, like giving up missions to strengthen finance, and decided instead to find a financial solution that allowed sustaining an unusual mission.”

Dr. Hulme asks Dr. Henking to continue that thread: “Can you tell us a little bit more about Shimer College and why you believed that it would be a good partner for North Central? What was it about the missions or the way the institution was constructed that made this seem like the best partner going forward?”  

Dr. Henking answers: “Shimer is and was a remarkable place. It was founded in the 1850s by two women in upstate New York and lives on, as you said, as the Shimer Great Books School of North Central College. The Shimer that I met had survived significant financial challenge and gone bankrupt in the 1970s. It had solved some of its issues during those times by moving. It moved from Mt. Carol to Waukegan, Illinois, to the south side of Chicago, where we partnered with Illinois Institute of Technology.  

“The curriculum itself is also very, very particular. During a period in the early 20th century, the first half to the 20th century, Shimer partnered with the University of Chicago and began to offer a core curriculum and admit people who did not yet have a high school degree. So the curriculum itself is what some people will call a Great Books curriculum; three-fourths of the curriculum required and one-fourth elective in a discussions format and very, very much focused on participatory learning, participatory teaching, and a multigenerational campus--and a very diverse campus in lots of ways.  

“It was a good partner for North Central for two reasons; one, North Central itself has both a liberal arts and a professional focus, and wanted to strengthen its liberal arts in the sciences end of the spectrum. Also they had just reorganized themselves. They’re about several thousand students into colleges at some smaller, it’s not a university but it’s another way of dividing things up rather than divisions. It was a really appropriate time for them to require and test out the idea of growth by acquisition. Alongside the Shimer College of Great Books there are other colleges inside North Central College such as the college that focuses on health, science and education. It also allows some of the things we couldn’t do for our students.  

“We were at IT; student services and the like were provided by Illinois Institute of Technology. That did not mean that we could do certain things. As an example, Shimer students could not participate in NCAA sports, which for some of them was of interest. They can now at North Central and North Central is a terrific place. It’s a liberal arts college in Naperville, Illinois, that also does significant professional education. It has a terrific focus on the sciences with the new science building. It really met our desire to stay in the geographic region.  

“They were open to keeping the curriculum as it was, the teaching philosophy the way it was. Everything went through their faculty governance procedure to ensure that the faculty were supportive of this curriculum and now it’s being taught in many ways just as it was for 20th century Shimerians and 21st century Shimerians.”

Dr. Hulme transitions the conversation from the micro level to the larger context of mergers in higher education, “Susan, it sounds like this move made so much sense on so many different levels but there are a lot of colleges and universities out there that are facing similar issues and that could imagine themselves moving into an acquisition or a merger. What would you say to them in terms of the greatest challenges? Now we know there are going to be a certain amount of legal and business challenges. Other than that what do you feel like are these obstacles that you had to overcome and the challenges that you had to address to even begin to make this a possibility?”

Dr. Henking responds: “You know we mentioned the legal and the regulatory pieces and those are really crucial. On that I would say the biggest challenge is we all think we’re the first one to do this. In fact it’s crucial to get together with some other people who say, 'Don’t reinvent the wheel every time.'  Now having said that, each one of these [instances] is different. You both have to not reinvent the wheel and invent your own wheel. By which I mean you’re going to have to do certain things. You have to fill in the same forms that happen to be Illinois or anywhere. You also have to make sure that what you’re doing is culturally appropriate for your institution and the institution with which you’re discussing merging or being acquired by. Underneath that I’d say the biggest risk, and the biggest challenge is to remember that it’s always a group of people who are doing this. I emphasize the word 'people.' I think it’s very easy to get stuck in the rules, regulations, litigation, and financial matters. Just as every institution is always trying to keep both things in mind, mission and finance, you have to in these fields as well.

“You have to remember that mission and finances themselves are always about people. In these instances you’re trying to match culture but you’re also trying to recognize the consequences for people are mixed. I think every one of these mergers and acquisitions is both, a wonderful win-win, and it is a loss, and managing both becomes critical and the symbolic of both. For example, alums on the one hand are extremely excited to see Shimer survive. On the other hand they’re worried that they’ve lost the Shimer they loved. Students are glad not to worry that their school is about to close and yet they gave up some things. For the first time in history they, I actually find it funny some of the things they miss. We had a pretty weak institution phase, sort of physical plant. It was not great and yet some of those are the things that they mourn for. I think the challenges are making sure that you manage the gory details of regulation, law and finance, while recognizing that even if those all work out perfectly you also have to work out the cultural and personal connections.  

“Lastly, I’d say the following thing; there’s a real risk that when the deal is done, when all the papers are signed, all the materials moved, that you done the deal and in truth you don’t know whether you’ve succeeded in what your goals were until many years down the pike. It’s a little bit like undergraduate education, right?  We fool ourselves sometimes by thinking we’ve completely assessed it; if we know what happened the day before graduation what they know. When really a reflective liberal arts, if you taught in liberal arts environment for a long time you know sometimes the most important thing you learn is when a student comes back ten or fifteen years later and talks about the impact on their life.  

“I think these mergers and acquisitions are like that too. You know what really works, if your goals are met but it’s not going to be immediate. I said to people when we were doing the deal, ‘We’ll know if this works if it’s still recognizably meets our values ten years down the pike, fifteen years down the pike.’

“It’s not going to be the same in the same way that Shimer was not the same and now Carol and Waukegan and now the south side of Chicago but it continues to pursue the same kinds of values, in clear intellectual ways, in participatory democracy ways, in all sorts of wings. I say the risk too is to quickly come to judgement or to think you’ve done the deal the day you sign all the legal documents.

“I will say one other thing. I think that eventually there’ll be a story. I’m in religious studies and we tell these stories that hold the community together, and Shimer, like every college, and North Central too, have stories we tell ourselves, about our origins, and about why we have the symbols we do and why we are the kind the place we are. I think it will be important for the stories to both retain the history, the facts of what happened, because those are important for places that need to learn from something like this example. But also to tell the stories that are as important to Shimer’s survival. That’s the story of Mrs. Shimer who got married in order to get the land that became Shimer College: a certain story of resilience and change and willingness to take risks is part of what Shimer is and I hope it’ll stay that way.”