London merger: Why the professors said 'no'

It was to be the mega-merger to beat all mergers - the marriage of University College London and Imperial College. But this week the plan was abandoned in the face of a dons' rebellion. Lucy Hodges looks at what makes mergers work – and how, in this case, it all went wrong

The death of merger talks between Imperial College and University College London (UCL) this week is a bitter disappointment to Sir Derek Roberts, UCL's provost, who believes it would have brought in some much-needed cash and burnished the college's international reputation.

But it comes as no surprise to anyone who saw the anti-merger websites where the strength and tone of the opposition was awesome. The Committee for UCL had 100 professors listed against, including Professor Steve Jones, the eminent geneticist and a couple of famous alumni, the novelist David Lodge and the director and broadcaster Sir Jonathan Miller; more important for the academics was the fact that the list contained a noticeable sprinkling of Nobel prize winners and Fellows of the Royal Society.

"It became increasingly obvious that the issue was too divisive in terms of the attitudes of staff," says Sir Derek. "Although there were some in support, there were a hell of a lot against and with this kind of change you need to feel that you are taking people with you. That wasn't the case."

When the merger was announced, the opponents wasted no time in taking on both Sir Derek and Sir Richard Sykes, rector of Imperial. Wild rumours flew. The irreverent saveucl.com website sported a "welcome" from Sir Richard. "Negotiation is irrelevant, you will be assimilated," he intoned in Dalek-speak. In case you hadn't got the message that UCL felt it was the victim of a takeover bid, the website's agony uncle, Jeremy Bentham, the philosopher and founder of UCL, rammed it home.

"Dear Jeremy, Why did these proposals come from out of the blue and why are they being steamrollered through?" asked Anxious from the Institute of Archaeology. Bentham replied: "Dear Anxious, I share your consternation at the importunate rapidity with which Provost Roberts is advancing his arguments..."

British higher education is in the grip of merger mania. And, in some instances, the staff and students don't like it one bit. Like companies, universities are joining with partners to "grow" their business, to become global players and end up more important than the sum of their parts. That is the reason that Sir Derek Roberts, UCL's provost, and Sir Richard Sykes, Imperial's rector, gave for their merger. But their opponents thought otherwise.

Not all merger talks run into this kind of uproar. The marriage between Manchester University and the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (Umist) is going ahead smoothly. The governing bodies of the two institutions have approved the idea, and staff are mostly on side apart from some trade union concern about jobs and whether two sets of terms and conditions can be married up.

Its rationale is not that different from the one behind the UCL/Imperial merger. In big science it makes little sense to have two research-intensive universities side by side duplicating facilities (two maths, two physics and two chemistry departments, and so on). And a merger would mean a much more powerful player on the world stage. But what is different is the way the merger has been handled.

In Manchester, the two institutions had six months in which the staff could get used to the notion. Initially, it was broached tentatively, as an idea to be examined, not as a done deal, and there followed wide-ranging discussion. Moreover, the two bosses were never going to be in competition for one another's jobs. Sir Martin Harris, of Manchester, and John Garside, of Umist, are retiring in September 2004, at the moment that the merged institution is born. That means a new vice chancellor can be hired for the new university.

These factors have been absent from the UCL/Imperial plan. The announcement was made in October to the astonishment of everyone, including senior administrators and council members of the colleges in question. Merger proposals would be put to the councils of both colleges on 19 December, we were told. Although there was no contest between Roberts and Sykes for the top job (Roberts is a caretaker until he goes at the end of academic year), UCL staff were perturbed that the exercise under way to find a new provost was halted. They feared that the job was being kept warm for Sir Richard, a prospect that filled them with terror.

As a former captain of industry and the architect of the merger of Glaxo with SmithKline Beecham, Sykes is seen as a hard-faced man whose priority is money-making. Both UCL and Imperial are overwhelmingly dominated by medical and biological sciences. They would have become even more so if they merged. Sykes might have been the chap to run a gargantuan bio-medical complex, but what would have happened to the other bits of UCL: its English and modern languages department, its famous architecture school (the Bartlett) and the Slade School of Art? "A lot of the arts faculty were beating their breasts and saying the merger was against the UCL's ethos," says Professor Jones.

For "ethos" read radicalism. Many UCL academics wear the radical label with pride, partly because of the college's history. UCL was established in opposition to Oxbridge to give an education to non-conformists. Imperial, by contrast, is the place for brainy anoraks who are pushing out the frontiers of knowledge in maths, computing and physics. "We didn't think it would work," says Professor Jones. "The overwhelming sentiment was against it."

One merger that has taken place this term between two former polytechnics, London Guildhall and the University of North London, has, however, shown that it can be done. Here you have had two universities of equal status coming together to form London Metropolitan University, the second biggest university in the United Kingdom in terms of student numbers. "This is the first time that two solvent universities have chosen to come together of their own accord and we think lessons can be learnt from it," says the chief executive, Brian Roper.

There have been problems. First, the two bosses are still at the helm, Roper as chief executive and Professor Roderick Floud, the former London Guildhall head, as vice chancellor. This has raised eyebrows. Won't it cause confusion? What happens if they disagree?

Second, a plea to the Higher Education Funding Council for an extra £13m to ease the transition was whittled down to £6.64m. The lecturers at London Guildhall opposed the merger, fearful that their university's academic reputation might be tarnished by UNL's "pack 'em in, teach 'em cheap" philosophy. Roper, former vice chancellor of UNL, rejects the characterisation, arguing that UNL was equal to if not better than London Guildhall in research and teaching.

In any event, the objections from the lecturers' union, the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (Natfhe) did not delay the merger. The union ended up declaring an official dispute about the proposed new terms and conditions. That has now been dropped because the management has declared that it wants to negotiate. "One of our concerns is that the merger was rushed," says Richard Kirkwood, chief negotiator for the northern branch of the new university. "A lot of questions were still unanswered on the merger date, 1 August, 2002, and we're still sorting it out."

Both Roper and Professor Floud counter that you must not hang about with a merger. Once you've made the decision to do it, you must press ahead, otherwise, says Roper, you allow opposition to foment. The two men first conceived the idea while walking round Krakow when they were attending a conference of European universities in October 2000.

They talked to their senior staff and conducted a series of studies comparing and contrasting the two institutions. They employed management consultants to come and ask awkward questions. Then the proposal was discussed with a larger group of people, until finally the two men went public in April 2001. The whole process from start to finish took 21 months.

Mergers take an age to bed down. Although UNL and London Guildhall merged on 1 August, you wouldn't know it if you visited the building in Jury Street in the City of London. It still sports the London Guildhall signs. And when The Independent was updating its A-Z of universities recently the two press offices of the former universities sent over two separate entries for the new university which had to be melded into one.

Nevertheless, the two bosses are gung-ho about the future. They have ambitious plans to become a pan-London university providing what they call distributed learning through further and higher education. Professor Floud believes that there are economies of scale to be made, particularly on selling off property. Initially, he expects the staff to grow but after a few years to drop off through natural wastage. The intention is to shift resources from administrators to student support.

Both former polytechnics have high drop-out rates, 38 per cent at UNL and 32 per cent at London Guildhall. The new university plans to develop a new cadre of support staff to help students with problems they have with housing, employment or their studies to stem this wastage.

There is no doubt that other universities will be beating a path to London Met's door to learn from this merger. Two other institutions, this time in Scotland, which are talking about tying the knot, are Aberdeen and Robert Gordon. The message to them and others is that mergers need to be proceeded with in a sensitive but determined way. Because universities, unlike companies, are run democratically, staff views have to be taken into account. And when they are, as in the case of UCL and Aston which was thinking of merging with Birmingham University, mergers sometimes have to be abandoned.

l.hodges@independent.co.uk