UNDERSTANDING AND IMPLEMENTING MANDATED REORGANIZATIONS 113 Additional cases The above three cases demonstrate that merging colleges occurs to save money, to look like peers, or to improve the effectiveness of administration. Other reasons for splitting exist (see Table 7.2.B at end of the chapter), a few of which are highlighted below. Financial exigency. With the termination of many administrators, staff, and faculty, a regional comprehensive campus merged eight colleges into three, with two of the three housing the Arts and Sciences programs. This university was able to meet its reduced budget circumstances when the savings from reorganization were included. Need for a unified vision. A research university had Arts and Sciences split among three colleges. Through time, the colleges were increasingly in competition with each other for a shrinking pool of funding, resorting to “zero-sum thinking.” A new budget model which largely tracked student credit hours was poised for implemen- tation, and there was a widely-held concern that the infighting would make their already insufficient budgets even worse. The president shared this concern and wanted to find a way to bring the faculty together through a common vision so a new consolidated college could present credible requests for resources to the campus. A faculty task force exploring options noted that the current three-college structure was inadequate to solve their overar- ching problems. Ultimately the decision was made to merge the three colleges under a single dean to attempt to address these challenges. Balance political power of colleges. A unionized, mid-sized, comprehensive univer- sity had a long-serving president and provost, and was organized into three colleges: Sciences & Social Sciences, Arts & Humanities, and a catch-all professional college. Faculty were concerned that the professional college was becoming financially and politically advantaged over the two liberal arts colleges because of to their non-uni- fied actions. The faculty, however, did not want any deans to lose their jobs. When two of three deans happened to depart their positions, the faculty encouraged the president to form a task force to explore restructuring. The task force drafted several organizational model options and recommended one to the campus. After extended discussions, the faculty narrowly voted down the proposal (which served as a recommendation to the president), but nonetheless the president elected to reorganize the colleges as recommended. The two liberal arts colleges fused into a single Arts and Sciences college, and the professional college was split into a Busi- ness college and a Human Sciences college. The increased size and unified actions of the new A&S college (now by far the largest college) did improve the retention of power and resources in the college to a degree, although some resources continue a lateral move into the professional colleges commensurate with the increasing numbers of students selecting those majors.