Maybe it was providence that put two well-respected liberal-arts colleges together in a town of 20,000 people in rural Minnesota. Maybe it was luck.
Either way, it’s an opportunity too good to pass up, say Steven G. Poskanzer and David R. Anderson, the presidents of Carleton College and St. Olaf College, respectively. Soon after Mr. Poskanzer arrived at Carleton in 2010, the presidents began talking about how these two colleges could work together more closely in areas like the library, the colleges’ technology infrastructure, human resources and payroll, and, ultimately, their academic programs.
“We immediately started addressing the question of how you enhance the quality of what you do, while controlling the costs of what you do, in a world of constrained resources,” Mr. Poskanzer says.
That question is one for the times. Carleton and St. Olaf’s effort, supported with a new $50,000 planning grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, fits with a growing chorus of people who say that fierce competition among colleges may not be best for the sector as a whole. Last month, for example, a paper published by the Center for American Progress suggested that institutions could form leagues to help them meet common admissions goals.
Others say there could be more cooperation, with a greater emphasis on academics. Eugene Tobin, the program officer for the liberal-arts-colleges program at the Mellon foundation, says that collaborations among liberal-arts institutions, and even research universities, are “the future of higher education.”
“Liberal-arts colleges in particular understand competition, and they compete for students, faculty, prestige, and visibility, but their organizational cultures tend to focus inward, and I think that needs to change,” he says.
Close, but Not Close Enough
Historically, says Mr. Poskanzer, there have been barriers between Carleton and St. Olaf, aside from the Cannon River that runs between their campuses in little Northfield, Minn. St. Olaf has been more conservative, still connected to the Lutheran church, educating lots of top Minnesota students; Carleton is secular and has been more politically liberal, drawing students from across the country.
Even beyond their cultures, the two colleges face hurdles to collaborating. Academically, they are on different calendars—Carleton is on trimesters, while St. Olaf is on a 4-1-4 term calendar. And there are areas where the colleges still plan to compete: When this collaboration effort was just getting started, both colleges happened to be searching for directors of their career centers. But they decided not to merge those offices.
“There are going to be places where Carls and Oles are literally competing for the same job,” or the same slots in graduate schools, Mr. Poskanzer says. Merging the offices “felt a little too rife with conflict of interest.”
But in the future, each time one of the colleges has an opening, administrators say they may ask if it is something that the two institutions can do better together. The goal is to share strengths. “Neither of our institutions has entered this with the primary and specific goal of reducing the size of the work force,” Mr. Anderson says.
The academic side, however, will be one of the most difficult areas to mesh, both presidents acknowledge. Mr. Anderson is reluctant to name specific departments that might be candidates for collaboration, because faculty members in those departments would “regard themselves as people with targets on their backs.” One area he does mention is education: Aspiring teachers have to take a long list of courses to become certified to teach in Minnesota public schools.
“Maybe our two institutions can do a better job together of offering a richer range of courses that can help students get certified,” he says. Once the colleges sort out their plans in areas like these, they will go back to the Mellon foundation with a pitch for a larger grant.
A History of Sharing
Higher education has some famous collaborations—perhaps the best-known among them are the Claremont Colleges, where seven institutions, each with a different emphasis, occupy roughly a square mile in Claremont, Calif. The colleges share library services, some academic programs and student-activity programs, and various administrative functions, like mail services, maintenance, and human resources.
There are other well-known partnerships, like the Five Colleges of Massachusetts, comprising Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, and Smith Colleges, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, or the consortium that embraces Bryn Mawr, Haverford, and Swarthmore Colleges. And colleges of all kinds form consortia for purchasing essentials like paper products, technology, or health care. The Wisconsin Association of Independent Colleges and Universities has helped its members save about $50-million on supplies and services in the past five years.
But in academics and course offerings, colleges have traditionally been reluctant to work together for fear of diluting their particular academic identities. Amid financial pressures and popular skepticism about the value of liberal-arts education, however, some colleges have little choice.
“It takes a lot of thoughtfulness, patience, and time, because collaboration is incredibly hard work,” Mr. Tobin says. “It is structurally complicated, and it can be politically fractious. But when it works, faculty members have new colleagues who create a larger academic community, and students have access to a richer variety of courses.”
The Mellon foundation is talking to various colleges that are considering partnerships for academic programs—among them, some of Pennsylvania’s liberal-arts colleges. Presidents at Gettysburg, Juniata, Muhlenberg, Ursinus, and Washington & Jefferson Colleges are just starting a conversation about what their institutions might gain if they combine forces on specialized and underenrolled programs. (Savings collaborations in back-office functions, library services, and other programs are part of that conversation as well.)
A Washington & Jefferson student in, say, advanced Chinese could go to a special room in the library and get connected through a screen to students and an instructor at the other colleges. The individual colleges would save money, and the students would get a richer experience, says Tori Haring-Smith, president of Washington & Jefferson. She compares the idea to Sunoikisis, a collaborative classics program started by the Associated Colleges of the South in the mid-1990s for many of the same reasons.
“Even as we share, this will force us to sharpen our individual identities, to define what our individual campuses as residential colleges have to offer,” she says.
Separate but Equals
That balance between collaboration and individual identity is one that the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University, in north-central Minnesota, have grappled with for a long time. Academically, the two institutions are totally merged, and many administrative functions are combined—the two colleges have one provost, one vice president of enrollment and financial aid, one library director, a single Phi Beta Kappa chapter, and so on.
MaryAnn Baenninger, president of the College of Saint Benedict, says the two colleges save perhaps 50 percent of what they would have spent if they were maintaining totally separate administrations. More important, she says, they have been able to benefit from a larger and more diverse faculty roster than they would as two institutions.
But the colleges, only six miles apart, have maintained distinct cultures since they began hammering out collaboration agreements 50 years ago. That may be made easier by the fact that they are gender-specific institutions—Saint John’s enrolls only men, while Saint Ben’s serves women. But it’s more than that, and maintaining that culture has to be attended to all the time, Ms. Baenninger says.
“Culture ultimately resides in the things that you don’t think it resides in,” she says. It’s in different kinds of meals that are served on each campus, or even things as small as whether the college uses paper towels or air dryers in the bathrooms, she says.
In a quest to be more efficient, Saint John’s and Saint Ben’s are now starting to “peck away at a lot of these nonacademic areas where a lot of the culture resides.” Ms. Baenninger says preserving the colleges’ cultures at the same time is one of the most interesting and difficult conundrums of her career.
Lately, she has advised half a dozen presidents who are considering collaborations. But it takes a courageous president and board of trustees to even entertain the possibility.
“When you contemplate a partnership conversation, you automatically contemplate a merger conversation, and that is the threat,” Ms. Baenninger says. “What merger generally means is that one institution loses its identity. There is a fear that the conversation is a slippery slope.”
But the alternative, in some cases, is also dire. More than one president contacted for this article mentioned the fate of Dana College, in Nebraska. Dana had been pushed by a major donor to work with—even to merge with—another small, struggling Lutheran college nearby. The colleges resisted, and Dana closed in 2010.
In these tough times, collaboration may preserve not just individual institutions but the diversity of higher education as a whole. Mr. Poskanzer recited an old Benjamin Franklin quip to make the point: “Either we all hang together, or we all hang separately.”
Correction (2/15/2013, 5:54 p.m.): This article originally misstated the location of the Claremont Colleges. The seven institutions are in Claremont, Calif., not Pomona, Calif. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.
