What Do Families Have to Do With Higher Education Mergers? |
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College mergers disrupt systems, not just structures.
Reactions to change reflect stress within relational systems.
Understanding systems helps explain resistance and adaptation.
As a family scholar, it’s difficult not to see life through a family theory lens.
After my recent Hallmark holiday movie series—where I explored how popular media reflects and shapes our understanding of family life—I find myself drawn in a different direction. This time, I’m applying family theories to something that, at first glance, may seem far removed from intimate relationships: higher education mergers and institutional change.
I’ll admit, this shift is partly motivated by personal experience. I’ve been part of several mergers, and like many in higher education, I’ve watched how these transitions unfold—not just structurally, but emotionally. But this focus also reflects a broader reality: Mergers, consolidations, and restructuring efforts are becoming increasingly common across colleges and universities.
And yet, we often talk about these changes in purely strategic terms—budgets, enrollments, efficiencies, and organizational charts. What we talk about far less is how they feel.
Why Use Family Theories to Understand Universities?
At first, the connection might seem like a stretch. Family theories are typically used to understand close relationships—partners, parents and children, siblings. They help us make sense of communication patterns, emotional dynamics, stress, and resilience within families.
But at their core, these theories are not just about families. They are about systems.
Family systems theory, for example, reminds us that individuals do not operate in isolation. They are embedded in networks of relationships, roles, and expectations. Change in one part of the system inevitably affects the whole. The same is true in organizations—especially in higher education, where identities, histories, and relationships run deep.
Colleges and universities are not just workplaces. They are relational systems:
Departments function as subsystems with their own cultures and norms
Faculty roles are shaped by expectations, traditions, and power structures
Leadership operates within—and often reacts to—the emotional climate of the institution
When a merger occurs, it doesn’t simply reorganize reporting lines. It disrupts these systems. And when systems are disrupted, people respond.
From Strategy to Stress
Family theories offer a language for understanding something we often overlook in higher education: stress and adaptation.
Why do some faculty embrace change while others resist it?Why do certain departments become more cohesive, while others fracture?Why do mergers sometimes feel less like strategic realignment—and more like loss?
These are not just management questions. They are systems questions.
By drawing on frameworks like family systems theory, the Double ABC-X model of stress and adaptation, and ambiguity and loss theory, we can begin to see patterns that might otherwise feel confusing—or even personal.
What looks like resistance may actually be a response to uncertainty.What looks like conflict may reflect deeper shifts in roles and identity.What feels like dysfunction may be a system trying to reorganize itself under pressure.
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A New Lens for a Changing Landscape
By reframing colleges and universities as systems under stress, we can better understand how individuals, departments, and leadership respond to disruption, loss, and reorganization during mergers.
Each post in this series will focus on a different lens:
How family systems theory helps explain why mergers feel so personal
Why stress—not just structure—determines whether institutions adapt
How ambiguous loss shows up when programs, roles, and identities shift
Why people respond so differently to the same change
How conflict and alliances form under pressure
What it takes to build a new, shared institutional identity
Higher education is in a period of significant transformation. Mergers and restructuring efforts are unlikely to slow down anytime soon. If we continue to approach these changes as purely technical problems, we risk missing the very dynamics that determine whether they succeed or fail.
But if we begin to understand universities as systems—much like families—we gain a more complete picture, one that accounts not only for strategy and structure, but also for relationships, meaning, and adaptation.
Because in the end, mergers don’t just combine institutions; they reshape the systems people live and work within.
Next: Why college mergers feel personal—and what family systems theory reveals about disruption, identity, and change.
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