University Mergers Sweep Across Europe

By Aisha Labi, Espoo, Finland. The cluster of glass buildings that serves as the headquarters of Nokia, the global telecommunications giant that is Finland's largest company, is a short stroll from the main campus of Aalto University, one of the country's newest higher-education institutions.
But the symbolic shadow the company casts across Finland's edu­cational, business, and even political landscape is long and omni­present.
"Where is the new Nokia?" asks Tuula Teeri, a molecular geneticist who was recruited from Sweden's Royal Institute of Technology to serve as Aalto's inaugural rector. "We need to stimulate innovation." That concern was one of the driving forces behind the creation of Aalto, which resulted from the merger of three institutions—in arts and design, business, and technology. By bringing together such seemingly disparate fields, Aalto's founders hope to stimulate new research and thus maintain the economic competitiveness that Finland has earned largely through the success of its technology sector. Aalto's creation is a cornerstone of a new national higher-education strategy. It is also part of a wave of university mergers happening across Europe in recent years, driven by concerns over economic competitiveness, research quality, and international reputation...
Motivated by Rankings
In France, a raft of national reforms to overhaul the higher-education system includes a plan for all universities to become officially autonomous by 2012. The government endorses closer links among institutions as a way of driving some of the country's institutions up the international rankings.
Nicolas Sarkozy, the nation's president, has taken France's relatively poor showing on the best-known rankings to heart and has spoken repeatedly of his goal of having two French universities in the top 20 and 10 in the top 100 of the world rankings. The French government has helped spur the merger trend with increased financing for 17 clusters of universities and research bodies that have been formed since 2007. The cooperation required for their formation has in some cases become the genesis of closer alliances and full-fledged mergers.
Andrée Sursock, a senior adviser at the European University Association, says the guiding principle behind university mergers in France is to expand research capacity through interdisciplinary work. The ambitious Saclay Campus project, on the outskirts of Paris, envisions a grouping of some two dozen universities, grandes écoles (as France's elite schools of higher education are known), clusters, and research institutes. Its director has said that the explicit goal of the $6-billion project, which is due for completion by 2015, is to rank among the top 10 universities in the world...
Merger Mania?
The cross-disciplinary research and engagement that is on display at the Design Factory is a powerful argument for the kinds of institutional fusions that have been taking place across Europe, some observers say. "All else being equal, there is an underlying logic that bigger is better," especially in the sciences, says Mr. Marginson. Larger institutions have "the potential of more-concentrated firepower, more diversity, more potential for cross-fertilization."
For Aalto, success could mean something as prosaic as a better mobile phone. As Ms. Teeri, the rector, observes, science, design, and marketing are increasingly connected. "You need design, not only because you need beautiful things, but increasingly you need designers who can understand what the consumer needs," she says.
Ultimately, whether a merger is successful may depend on what motivated it. Already some academics fear that the trend could become something of a fad in higher education.
"What would worry me," says Ms. Sursock, of the European University Association, "is if this becomes the fashion, and ministries start encouraging or providing incentives for mergers when they don't have any raison d'être." More...