119Reducing Higher Education Bureaucracy and Reclaiming the Entrepreneurial. . .

State Level

At the U.S. state level, many governments are addressing fiscal challenges by consolidating state institutions’ faculty, administration, and programs. The most recent example is the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education (PASSHE) merging of six of the state’s 14 public universities into two entities: California, Clarion, and Edinboro united in the western, and Bloomsburg, Lock Haven and Mansfield together in the eastern part of the state (PASSHE, 2021). State-based public university consolidations, including the Pennsylvania proposal, are usually very unpopular with faculty and staff, and some other stakeholders (Whitford, 2021). PASSHE (2021, p. 1) expects tremendous benefits including, “Expand program breadth while maintaining essential residential character at each campus; Capitalize on existing strengths at all institutions; achieve more together than any one of them could do alone; Invest in new areas to serve new students who need our help, growing enrollment, driving regional economic development; Re-tool and strengthen supports for all students; and Reduce administrative costs investing savings in student success” as well as taxpayer cost savings of at least $18.4 million in 5 years. The recent success of the University of South Florida’s consolidation of the main Tampa campus together with the St. Petersburg and Sarasota-Manatee