No Time to Die? Adaptation, Death, and After-Life in German Private Higher education.

Universities are survival experts. They are “undoubtedly among the oldest formal organizations” (Meier and Krücken 2006: 244), making up more than 80 percent of the top 500 institutions in age, as Clark Kerr has argued. It is through this perseverance that universities have become the dominant organizational model for post-secondary education and research worldwide (Baker 2014; Meyer and Frank 2020; Powell and Baker 2024). Because of this global success story, the gravestones of those entrepreneurial university endeavors that smoothed the way for others to follow often remain unseen. We know very little about the conditions under which universities die. Research that investigates mortality factors following population ecology approaches has so far found no single factor beyond resource abundancy that explains the success or failure of universities (cf. Darraz et al. 2010; Bell et al. 2022). Instead of focusing on organizational mortality, the organizational exitus as a fait accompli, the paper investigates the organizational and environmental conditions under which universities vanish from a sectoral count. It argues that both organizations and universities have a distinct institutional form that makes it considerably difficult to kill. Beyond their sectoral death, formal organizations can persevere in a different form (afterlife). Universities have, since their origins, been extremely flexible in moving their bodies across place and time (cf. Mitterle 2021), often reappearing after they had been closed long and for good. Consequently, there might be mimetic patterns of adaptive organizational behavior, collective reactions of closure and morphing to external shocks, that allow to diversify explanations of university mortality. In studying death trajectories, ‘gravestones’ (organizational embedding), and afterlife in contrast to ‘surviving’ universities, the study provides for an upside-down view that may help better understand the distinct institutional conditions that make universities such unique experts of survival. The paper draws on an ongoing in-depth study of all state-accredited private higher education institutions in Germany since 1945. While private higher education still takes a peripheral position in the German higher education system, it is empirically helpful for the study of organizational death and survival: it is much more volatile than the public sector; private universities are overall small and often mono-disciplinary, yet framed as more adaptive and reactive and thus as innovators for the public sector. The abundance of resources and the strong dependency on tuition in an otherwise tuition-free higher education system nurtured a “no-time-to-die”-real-type of universities (c.f. Mitterle 2017) that match contemporary policy ideal-types imposed on public universities after the governance and Bologna reforms (Krücken 2017; Mitterle and Stock 2021). The paper traces the historic trajectories of all state-recognized private higher education in Germany, their organizational characteristics, resources, and their environmental embedding. The historic trajectories allow to identify common reaction patterns to environmental conditions (e.g., change of location after decline in resources), paces of organizational change, collective shocks (change in accreditation or regulation), and singular events and to contextualize them within their social relations.