Treasurer Stephen Mullighan says that if the universities of Adelaide and South Australia don’t “voluntarily” agree to amalgamate they risk losing merger support funding while still facing a government-established inquiry to “find ways in which the universities can merge”.
Universities are not monoliths, to me it seems like the desire for a merger was a top-down motivation (i.e. by top level management) that faced strong opposition bottom-up (staff and faculty).