The Greenwich-Kent merger: some (historical) thoughts

I recently launched this site and, now that I have the space and the blog to jot down longer thoughts, I thought I might as well make some unsolicited comments on the big news in universityland this weekend: the planned merger of the University of Greenwich and the University of Kent.

The two institutions intend to join forces in a novel multi-university group, provisionally called the London and South East University Group (labelled a ‘super university’), under a single executive governance structure led by Greenwich’s Jane Harrington (which feels indicative of the direction the organisation will be heading, and Jo Grady seems to think so as well) while retaining distinct identities and degree awarding powers. The move is set to be completed by the 2026-27 academic year. The BBC’s coverage (which is apparently struck a chord, compared with the other big news of the move of the skills brief into DWP in the last week) was the first I saw and is understandably high level, the Times Higher Education piece was initially pretty sparse essentially just repeating statements from the two partners (until this morning when they updated it); while the Wonkhe blog offered a fuller treatment: the combined institution would, on 2023-24 numbers, have nearly 46,885 students (29,695 at Greenwich and 17,190 at Kent), employ around 2,550 academic staff, and offer 442 full-time undergraduate courses. This is pretty big but not huge and on Bluesky Mike Ratcliffe wasn’t particularly taken by the label ‘super-university’ (but if Canterbury Christ Church, which already collaborates through the joint Medway campus and the mention of which I don’t think was dropped into the Wonkhe piece accidentally, were to become more fully involved, then the new grouping could be very large for a British university, even surpassing UCL in student numbers). THE is trying for 'Kentwich'.

Given the current financial climate of universities the idea of mergers, rather than ‘unplanned market exit’, has been on the radar for some time. Most visibly, following discussion of a Universities UK conference in May, the notion of ‘multi-university trusts’ was floated explicitly compared to ‘multi-academy trusts’ though interested in the possibilities beyond the financial. Until yesterday I’d assumed such discussions would primarily concern Welsh universities. The case of City St George’s is also relevant here as a recent example of merger on the English side. Other than this HEPI blog piece I’ve not seen much on comparisons with the Further Education sector, which spoke around the importance of cultural alignment, early governance design, stakeholder buy-in, realistic financial modelling, and clear rationales and ongoing steering to effective collaboration. That piece also spoke about it being better to move before being pushed: perhaps apposite regarding Kent’s reported situation, Greenwich wasn’t on my radar but THE updated their article with this piece this morning. Hitherto most information regarding the possibilities arising from mergers were regarding shared services and economies of scale. This piece for HEPI recalled the 1992 Management and Administrative Computing initiative, which faltered because partners lacked trust and prized specialism above cooperation. There are historical precedents that worked more effectively, such as the formation of UCAS from UCCA in the 1960s, which centralised admissions. I’ve not heard much historically about the consequences of these mergers and developments on staff, particularly as historical narratives of university developments tend to be written from a managerial perspective and from administrative documentation.

I’m not qualified to offer any reflections on the mechanisms of these developments so instead here’s some loose vaguely historical things this makes me think of:

1. How far is this an interesting re-run or deviation of the old pattern of federal universities? Victoria University, 1880-1904ish based around the orbit of Manchester included Liverpool and Leeds; Wales 1893 to mid-2010s, and London all display very different trajectories and patterns. I’d like to know more.

2. Greenwich’s lineage goes back via Woolwich Polytechnic (1890-1970), later Thames Polytechnic, before achieving university status in 1992 and throughout its history has been involved in various mergers of all different kinds. Kent by contrast was launched in 1965 as part of the ‘Shakespearean Seven’ universities, the wave of greenfield institutions (and popular image as a ‘university university wink wink’ is possibly a reason for the prominence of this merger). I can’t think of a similar merger in England or Scotland in recent decades involving a pre-1992 university and a post-1992 with such distinctive identities, at least since New University Ulster and Ulster Polytechnic in 1984 under very different political circumstances (Manchester Victoria and UMIST, 2004 is also another different story).

3. Very relatedly, April also marked the sixtieth anniversary of Anthony Crosland’s 1965 Woolwich speech (I didn’t see this marked anywhere) delivered at the Woolwich polytechnic. There he announced, much to the alarm of the university leadership, of a new model for higher education based on proximity to the state and determined national needs and expansion of opportunities to those currently not served by the universities. After the launch of the ‘binary system’, Crosland later produced a speech for the University of Lancaster (another later Shakespearean Seven university like Kent) which sketched a much more conciliatory vision for the binary system. There’s a fascinating and currently unremarked alignment of the two intellectual traditions of polytechnics and universities which has come together in interesting ways at these two institutions, which until at least the 1990s were seen in highly dichotomous terms. Possibly either indication of a greater historical alignment in these models (as I have argued), and/or movement in the scope of these models regarding academic/vocational drift.