Knowledge, Perceptions and Attitudes to Mergers at the University of the North

The underlying purpose of this study was to examine the attitudes of senior management at the University of the North towards the goals and plans for the restructuring of higher education with a specific focus on the merger proposed by the Ministry of Education. A predominantly qualitative design was selected primarily because of the size of the sample and the nature of the responses to be elicited. The research focuses on the merger as a mechanism to achieve transformation in addition to other restructuring initiatives. The study corroborates the findings of previous research in this area, which indicate that the long-term failure rate of mergers is due to neglect of the target’s culture, structure, processes and networks. These findings highlight some of the critical success factors that must be taken into consideration in the pre-merger phase. The research also raised several key issues including the necessity of merging partners to agree with the goals, objectives and policy instruments in place. One of the major conclusions is that agreement in this respect may be a desirable but knowledge of the same is critical to the success of the merger. What became apparent from the research undertaken is that senior managers did not disagree with goals and objectives but rather with the policy instruments used for restructuring.