As the athletic conference’s academic counterpart, the Big Ten Academic Alliance facilitates the sharing of resources, infrastructure and expertise among consortium members. (Illustration/Eleanor Shakespeare)
Academic Excellence — to the Power of Ten
How joining the Big Ten Academic Alliance — now with 18 members — will elevate Trojans’ experiences, from the lab and the classroom to the halls of administration.
Now that USC has joined the Big Ten Conference, it is part of a league whose 18 members happen to be prominent research universities known for driving innovation in a vast array of fields. One might expect similar institutions to be academic rivals, just as they are on the gridiron.
But thanks to the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) — the athletic conference’s academic counterpart — these schools embrace a spirit of partnership in various key academic areas. Established in 1958 (and known as the Committee on Institutional Cooperation until 2016), the alliance facilitates the sharing of resources, infrastructure and expertise among consortium members, helping these like-minded universities better execute their missions and goals.
“It is the only alliance of large, comprehensive research universities in the country,” says Keith Marshall, the BTAA’s executive director. “The opportunities available through the BTAA are truly unique.”
With USC’s entry into the BTAA, Trojan faculty, students and staff alike can now benefit from the alliance’s array of library assets, peer groups, research consortiums, course-sharing programs and much more.
“The Big Ten Academic Alliance is a deeply collaborative enterprise,” says USC Provost Andrew T. Guzman, who will serve as a liaison between USC and the BTAA. “It’s an exciting expansion in the set of people we have to work with and learn from.”
Leveling up research
In 1967, Herman B Wells — then-chancellor of the University of Indiana and one of the founders of what came to be known as the BTAA — published a paper that described the rationale for academic cooperation among Big Ten schools.
“Academic isolation has long been impractical; in today’s world, it is impossible,” Wells wrote. “At a time when yesterday’s bright new fact becomes today’s doubt and tomorrow’s myth, no single institution has the resources in faculty or facilities to go it alone.”
Nearly 60 years later, these principles endure and have become even more relevant. Ishwar K. Puri, USC’s senior vice president of research and innovation and professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, notes that addressing modern problems of significant complexity such as climate change increasingly necessitates cross-institutional teams to find solutions.
Teaming with other top-performing research universities in the alliance “can only strengthen and validate USC’s commitment to doing what we do for the betterment of society,” Puri says.
While USC is already a “heavyweight” in research, with expenditures topping $1 billion, Puri expects that USC’s BTAA membership will significantly expand the university’s research horizons and help attract more federal funding for projects of national import. “The ability to form alliances coast to coast allows us to demonstrate broader impact,” he says.
The Big Ten Cancer Research Consortium and the Big Ten Neurosurgery Consortium are notable instances of scholars across the BTAA uniting around formidable research questions. But the alliance also nurtures research in small and emerging fields. For example, the BTAA Liberal Arts and Sciences (LAS) Deans Group offers cross-institutional grants in humanities and sciences. Last year, the group funded collaborative projects in nascent fields including transgender studies and AI and language acquisition, among others.
“At our own institutions, we probably have two or three individuals researching in each of those areas,” says Adrian Randolph, dean of the Judd A. and Marjorie Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University and co-chair of the LAS Deans Group. “But when you look at the Big Ten, suddenly there are 25 or 30 people. The alliance produces a critical mass in some small areas, which I think is really helpful.”
Student researchers also have opportunities to connect across the alliance. Through the Traveling Scholar Program, doctoral students can spend up to a full academic year at any Big Ten institution to pursue specialized courses of study or work in advanced laboratories. Undergrads interested in future doctoral study can participate in BTAA’s Summer Research Opportunities Program, which provides mentorship and enrichment to help prepare diverse students for graduate work.
Sharing a wealth of knowledge
Peer groups like the LAS Deans Group make up the heart of the BTAA. These groups provide academic leaders and support staff across institutions a forum to swap knowledge, work on shared initiatives, and meet virtually and in person. Nearly any academic role you can think of on campus — from provosts and deans to librarians and writing center directors — has its own BTAA peer group. Other peer groups are organized around common interests, such as the Women+ in Technology Group.
The Library Deans Group works to coordinate books as a collective resource across the alliance. Reciprocal borrowing privileges among BTAA members allow easy access to the library holdings of any university in the Big Ten (as well as the University of Chicago, a BTAA affiliate). But soon, coordination between the libraries will go far beyond interlibrary loans.
For the past five years, staff across the BTAA have been working to build the infrastructure necessary to manage these distinct collections as one unified library called the BIG Collection. Taken together, these volumes will represent roughly a quarter of all print titles in North America and be the third-largest library collection in the world, just behind the Library of Congress and the British Library.
“Instead of having 19 collections that we share, we’re thinking of it as one collection that we build together and that is available to everybody from discovery to delivery,” Marshall says.
Damon Jaggars, chair of the Library Deans Group and vice provost and dean of university libraries at Ohio State University, explains that the project will help member institutions meet the pressing challenges facing university libraries today.
“Given the proliferation of published material around the world, no one library can collect it all,” Jaggars says. “We’re seeing an increasing need for interdependence.”
Each campus will continue to own and oversee its distinct holdings. But rather than working to collect materials comprehensively across disciplines, each university can focus its purchasing resources on the unique research strengths of its faculty and lean on BTAA partners for depth in other areas.
“This is collective action to improve services at the local level,” Jaggars says, adding a sentiment that echoes the BTAA’s athletic ties: “We’re playing the long game here.”
Speaking the same language
Another way the alliance pools academic resources is through CourseShare, a distance-learning program that allows students at alliance schools to take less commonly taught language courses offered at any partner institution. Courses in more than 100 world languages — Swahili, Thai, Vietnamese, Hebrew, Hindi, Urdu and more — are available through synchronous and asynchronous instruction.
“CourseShare partnerships offer more access to more languages to support more students as they develop higher levels of competency,” says Christopher P. Long, who recently joined the University of Oregon as provost and senior vice president. Long served in leadership roles at Penn State University and Michigan State University (both Big Ten schools) for nearly two decades; he has been instrumental in expanding the CourseShare program’s online offerings and improving coordination between alliance members to offer paths to advanced language proficiency.
Hive mind
BTAA peer groups serve as informal training grounds for honing leadership skills. Randolph says that being part of a peer network helps him and his colleagues leverage leadership expertise from across the Big Ten to further their academic missions. “When we have conversations, I feel we’re at the epicenter of trying to develop the future of higher education in America,” he says.
Through the Academic Leadership Program (ALP), faculty can also participate in formal training that helps prepare them for the challenges of academic administration. Long participated in this program from 2011 to 2012 when he was an associate dean at Penn State.
“Most of us who are administrators come out of the faculty,” Long says. “In graduate school, we didn’t learn how institutions work. We didn’t learn how to lead teams. The ALP was one of the most transformational experiences I had as a young administrator.”
Over the years, Long built long-term relationships with BTAA peers. He’s delighted that the University of Oregon, like USC, is now entering the alliance, allowing him to preserve these connections and lean on them to elevate Oregon’s academic experience.
“The real value of the Big Ten Academic Alliance is that we’re building meaningful human relationships across partner institutions, so that we’re learning and we’re getting better together as we think about how we can impact the lives of students, faculty and staff,” Long says. “These relationships move us away from zero-sum thinking and tap our collective potential.”
