The Identity Crisis Behind Mergers Higher Education |
Mergers disrupt identity, not just organizational structure.
Faculty react differently based on which identities feel threatened.
Resistance often reflects grief, uncertainty, and loss of belonging.
Conversations around higher education mergers require explorations of identity, emotion, and systems. People do not respond to mergers simply because reporting lines change or departments reorganize. They respond because mergers disrupt meaning, belonging, relationships, status, and identity. What looks from the outside like resistance to change is often something much deeper: an attempt to preserve a sense of self within a shifting institutional landscape.
In earlier posts, I discussed how family systems theory can help explain why mergers evoke such strong emotional reactions across universities. In this next post, I want to build on that idea using Stryker and Burke’s Identity Theory to explore why people within the same merger can experience it in dramatically different ways — from excitement and possibility to grief, anger, withdrawal, or distrust.
When faculty hear that their college will merge with another unit, the reaction is often framed publicly as resistance to change, territoriality, or concern about budgets and governance. But those explanations rarely capture the emotional intensity that follows. Why does a structural change in an organization feel so personal?
Identity theory, particularly the work of sociologists Sheldon Stryker and Peter Burke, offers a compelling explanation: mergers threaten the social identities people use to understand who they are in the academic world.
Universities Are Identity Systems
According to Stryker’s Identity Theory, people hold multiple identities tied to the roles they occupy and the groups to which they belong. Faculty are........