Merge Class Comprehensive University Organizational Characteristics And Management

China has started the reform on its higher education administrative system ever since the 1990's. Under the guideline of co-investment and adjustment, cooperation and combination, several large scale universities were established as a result of merger. Years of enrollment expansion have enlarged such universities greatly in the course of higher education massification. Such huge mergers are mostly comprehensive universities which provide quality human resources to meet the need of social development and the scientific development. As a new type of organization, such comprehensive mergers possess not only the normal organizational features of higher education institutions, but also the additional features such as large scale, multi campus, multi discipline, multi culture and complex structure. Owing to these specialties, the comprehensive mergers usually have difficulties in developing interdisciplinary potentials, solving the inner cultural conflicts and managing the scattered campuses.Disciplines are the basic elements of a university. Disciplines are also the core parts in the administration system of a university. The comprehensive mergers are usually proud of the academic coverage of their disciplines. Yet multi-discipline does not equal to blending of disciplines. Only interactions among disciplines can bring real advantage of multi-discipline. So the key point of academic development is to promote interaction of disciplines. The comprehensive mergers usually have difficulties in developing interdisciplinary potentials mainly because of the set up of too many schools which limited the disciplinary capacity and the relatively less setup of interdisciplinary research groups or institutes. In a word, the academic development of comprehensive mergers usually shows low scale efficiency. To solve this problem, the comprehensive mergers should put more emphases on the development of basic disciplines and disciplines with specialties, make more efforts to regulate school setup, and invest more to develop cross discipline research and teaching.