This interactive seminar on strategic leadership explores how mergers, acquisitions, and institutional transformation are reshaping the future of design, sustainability, and the higher-education ecosystem. Grounded in the Institute’s theme, Creating Tomorrow’s Institutions, Together, the seminar positions mergers and acquisitions as a continuum of institutional partnerships, not merely as responses to challenges but as opportunities to strengthen the mission, foster innovation, expand institutional capacity, and build sustainable futures together.
Designed for chief academic, financial, enrollment, advancement, and marketing and communications officers, the seminar emphasizes strategic leadership, cross-functional collaboration, institutional stewardship, and forward-looking thinking. Rather than focusing narrowly on transactions, the seminar explores how institutions can collaborate more intentionally, strategically, and proactively while staying true to their mission and institutional identity.
The seminar is designed to help participants:
- Identify how institutions can collaborate earlier and more intentionally to build sustainable mission-centered futures together
- Better understand the evolving higher education landscape and the rise of strategic collaboration
- Explore the continuum of collaborative models emerging across higher education
- Understand how institutions responsibly and ethically navigate mergers and acquisitions as a continuum of partnerships, affiliations, closures, and institutional transformation
- Examine the roles of governance, culture, communication, and leadership during institutional change
Reyes M. Gonzalez, CIC Senior Advisor for Mergers and Partnerships
Raymond R. Kennelly, Senior Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer, Lewis University (IL)
Interactive seminars cover important issues that currently impact independent higher education. They are designed to be practical and hands-on with clear learning outcomes. Each will include examples of replicable models for participants to use when faced with the situations covered by the seminars.
These interactive seminars are free of charge and do not require pre-registration, but they have limited capacity. Space is available on a first-come, first-served basis.