The 'Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC)', also known as the "Academic Big Ten", was established in
1958 and is a consortium of twelve primarily
Midwestern universities (the eleven members of the
Big Ten Conference and the
University of Chicago) committed to advancing academic excellence by promoting and coordinating collaborative activities and sharing resources. Its programs and activities extend to all aspects of university activity except intercollegiate athletics. These endeavors are organized to augment and complement institutional programs without supplanting them or reducing their individual importance.
The CIC is governed by the thirteen Chief Academic Officers of the member universities (with a provost from both Illinois Chicago and Illinois Urbana Champaign) who are known as the CIC "Members." A headquarters staff of 16, located in
Champaign, Illinois, administers the CIC programs.
CIC universities confer, on average, 15% of all
Ph.D. degrees awarded annually in the United States. Collectively, the CIC member universities engage in $5.6 billion in externally funded research annually, employ more than 33,000 full-time faculty members, and enroll nearly one-half million undergraduate, graduate, and professional students.
On June 6 2007, the CIC announced a new partnership with
Google. An explicit goal of the project is that of offering a public, shared digital repository of all the open access content. The
University of Michigan, which has developed its MBooks platform for its own digitized books, will serve as the central repository for the CIC project.
External links
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The Committee on Institutional Cooperation