The CIC (Committee on Institutional Cooperation) is no longer.... Introducing the B1G Academic Alliance
The CIC the B1G's academic division has changed its name to the B1G Academic Alliance in order to easily convey its mission and increase its visibility. Its membership constitutes the B1G members and formerly the University of Chicago... and is a national powerhouse when it comes to reseach. For Example:
B1G Academic Alliance: $10 billion in reseach dollars spent annually *
University of California system: $5 billion
Ivy League Schools: $4.3 billion
* This does not even include John Hopkins University (#1 nationally in R&D expenditures). They have an invite and are still on the sidelines deciding whether to join or not.
https://ncsesdata.nsf.gov/profiles/site?method=rankingBySource&ds=herd.
(FYI: Michigan is #2 (GO BLUE!)
The B1G (including John Hopkins) has 13 institutions in the top 50 and 3 in the top 5.
http://www.news-gazette.com/news/local/2016-06-30/cic-drops-name-raise-…
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2016/06/30/big-tens-academic-…
http://www.btaa.org/news-and-publications/news/2016/06/30/the-committee…
Edit: Credit to CarrIsMyHomeboy below for pointing out that the CIC and BIG Academic Alliance may have different involvement from/with the University of Chicago.
This is where the big money is, and is the reason many institutions want to join the Big Ten.
The amount of money dwarfs the money they get from athletics.
And will be a major consideration in any future B1G expansion.
Notables:
Duke
North Carolina
MIT (as a rowing affiliate)
Georgia Tech
Texas
MIT would probably be more competitive than in the Eastern Conference in rowing but not by much.
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for their #12 ranking in R&D expenditures as for their rowing competitiveness. They are similar to John Hopkins and Lacrosse in this regard.
How? Do they share money? I thought schools' research budgets came from endowments and whatnot
This is also likely one of the reasons Maryland and John Hopkins got the invite. DC is now in the B1G footprint.... Additionally the B1G collaborates a lot on projects together and they share library resources among all member institutions.
Sharing research aside, I just saw in one of your links that they save the schools $19 million alone just by sharing software licenses. Never would've even crossed my mind.
Thanks for posting.
Forgot to mention they pool their power by negotiating together and buying in bulk.
I don't think so. A school's conference or consortium affiliation is not a factor in the awarding of Federal research funds.
You're right, but it's the data and software access that makes it more valuable than athletic money. It's not quite as tangible as something like a TV contract though.
All the B1G schools (except Rutgers and Maryland) are connected to a fiber optic network called OmniPoP. So basically if Wisconsin gets a grant, I could use my UM credentials and have access to all of their government funded data. All the universities have access to $10 Billion worth of research a year.
That's an overstatement. You can't access data that you haven't been authorized to access or isn't publicly available. I have Federally funded research contracts with 2 B1G universities right now. OmniPoP doesn't provide you with access to anything we are doing.
is not a factor directly in allocating research grants. But with Maryland literally down the from road from DC (and a B1G office there) and Rutgers literally down the road from Mathattan (again with an office there) I would imagine it might put the B1G in better position to lobby it's case for why they or an individual institution might best be able to utilize said funds. Just speculating.
I always get it confused with CIC (combat information center)
I...don't.
served in the military. If you did, and served in some kind of leadership role you would understand.
Commander in Chief bro!
/only ever in NROTC through cortramid
commander in chief bro!!! Don't have to be in military to get that. duh
When Johns Hopkins does hear about the dose his brother John got he gonna be pissed.
does this make it easier to send penn state packing to the acc?
YES RGard, yes +1!!! Even the Univ of Pitts. is higher than them!
BTW, FUCK penn state and all their delusional joepa loving fans!!!
They are delusional fucks. I actually know some non-delusional ones, 2 to be precise and they are both nice folks (one is my cousin), but the vast majority sicken me.
Excellent. Some of that money will support my son, who is starting a PhD in math at Wisconsin this Fall.
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And yes it will.
The CIC has probably always been the most important outcome of the Big Ten's existence. But the OP is slightly mistaken. U-Chicago is no longer a member. That was just announced today and is a likely impetus for the name change. The likely impetus for U-Chicago leaving? That's hard to confirm; however, they did recently threaten to leave if the Big Ten ever accepted "another" non-AAU institution. So the issue appears to have been somewhat brought on by adding UNL.
You may have a bit more background knowledge that what I read. Cheers, will correct.
This is fascinating and frankly shocking. Can anyone add more to this?
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Nebraska lost its AAU membership for a shitty reason and is as qualified or better than lots of members, so the big ten didn't see their addition as an academic step down.
so they subtracted that from their research numbers... plus the AAU is decreasing it's weight on agricultural R&D.
Nebraska had been a member of the AAU since 1909 and was still a member just prior to their official B1G admittance date.
Seems like their med school location and USDA funded ag research were the culprits. I'm sure it's not impossible to be invited back, if Nebraska is even seeking that.
What benefits does AAU membership bring? Also, why would one school (UN) not being a member hurt other schools?
/i know nothing about the AAU
Nebraska was a member of the AAU when they were invited to join the B1G, but they were ousted from the AAU before they formally joined the B1G. However, you may be partially correct because the vote to invite Nebraska to the B1G was unanimous whereas two B1G schools (Michigan and Wisconsin) voted against allowing Nebraska to remain in the AAU.
As an aside, UNL should not have been kicked out of the AAU, and I'm a little disappointed that Michigan voted in favor of their ouster. For whatever reason, there seemed to have been a faction within the AAU that was intent on removing UNL, and they were going to do it one way or another (indicated by the fact that the voting deadline was extended because not enough schools had voted by the original deadline). The fact that they couldn't count the research money generated by their medical campus in Omaha in their favor because it was under a separate administrative structure was a pure technicality.
Goddamn cornhuskers...
Nebraska was an AAU member as of the day they were formally invited to join the Big Ten, but by the date of their formal entry they'd been tossed out of the AAU. They were tossed because the UN medical campus is in Omaha, not Lincoln, and also because a good portion of UN's research dollars are agricultural in origin and for some reason that's a pickle up the butts of other AAU members.
I've read that the booting of UN was instigated by Texas in revenge for Nebraska leaving the Big 12 for the Big Ten.
In any event, if Chicago thought that leaving the CIC was justified simply because Nebraska was part of the conference, that's their fuckup.
There's got to be more to it than that, right- I understand the UNL situation but UC must have something else causing them to leave not just a technicality re: UNL
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I think all schools that were invited to join the B1G were automatically invited to join the CIC. Given that the University of Chicago no longer has any formal relationship with the B1G, I would imagine that they didn't like being in the awkward position of supposedly being a full member of an exclusive organization (the CIC) and yet being the only member without a vote in deciding who else gets invited to join. It wasn't much of an issue in the past since the B1G's membership stayed constant for 44 years after Chicago left, but I'm sure the wave of conference realignment over the past few years has been a factor in how they viewed their place in the CIC. They obviously don't put as much emphasis on athletics as the other CIC members, and they probably saw the expansion of the CIC to include the new B1G members as a case of the tail wagging the dog.
I bet Rutgers isn't in the top 50
Immediately after Northwestern at #30 and immediately before Illinois at #32.
Again, in addition to football recruits and the "New York" media market they bring academics and R&D money to the table....
I know we all love to joke about how pathetic Rutgers is, but academically, it's not a bad school. As B1G schools go, it's probably in the middle of the pack.
You're saying these are the schools that still require students to take algebra?
Well played
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F***ing funny!
Well played indeed.
that the University of Chicago was a founding member of the Big 10. They stopped being an athletic member but they continued to be a member of the academic consortium (until now.) The comments indicated that they will continue to be a part of the co-operative efforts in some areas. This inidcates that they might fullly come back into this function of the B1G as they are keeping a foot in the door.
might get an "academic affiliate" status or whatnot. Look at those numbers, I can't imagine they would turn down the opportunity to pool their resources with like minded institutions... just don't see it.
Plus I'm sure the B1G is "subtley" encouraging/helping NU get back their AAU status... even though Michigan and Wisconsin were among the schools that voted them out. Plus at the time of acceptance they were AAU members.
I think the problem they were having with the CIC is that they weren't sure they were a like-minded institution. Chicago's quite unlike the 13 public B1G schools--for one thing there's no large pool of undergraduates to instruct, which affects how resources are allocated.
This has been simmering for quite a while. One of the reasons the UAA was founded was to put together a collection of schools closer in spirit to the post-Hutchins Chicago ideal. Maybe that group is about to announce a formal consortium beyond athletics?
The University of Chicago has some mad street cred in the physics department. It is the school of which Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard operated the very first ever nuclear reacter, CP-1. It was part of the Manhattan Project and helped usher in nuclear weapons.
It has mad street cred in pretty much every department. It's unquestionably better academically than any school in the B1G.
It's great at pretty much everything it does, but economics is its big claim to fame. It has more Nobel Laureates in economics than any other school (by far).
Guys, you need to be a more critical customer of university marketing BS. The ex-CIC is mostly bullshit, and the universities' press releases regarding it are highly misleading.
- it has NOTHING to do with grant money. NOTHING. Any suggestion to the contrary is just something implied by misleading press releases.
- it has precious little to do with academics, to the extent their is a benefit, it flows to state schools with tighter budgets. The library costs / purchasing contracts benefit somewhat from scale on negotiations, but at the price of control. And the savings, even when construed in the most positive light, are under a $1 million a year for member schools. In the background, UChicago is doing the wanking motion.
- it allows for some ease in sharing faculty, credits, off-campus programs, but that's actually a cost to better schools, whose credits are more valuable and aren't really competing with places like Purdue and Nebraska.
- the library benefits are de minimis, because graduate students have access to everything, anyways. Do you really think if, say, a Yale student needs a document from IU-Bloomington, they won't get access to it? That's not how it works.
Every time the ex-CiC puts out one of its ridiculously self-congratulatory press releases, me and a friend, who is a very senior administrator of a Michigan-level university, have a good laugh not just at the bullshit in the release, but folks' categorical acceptance of it as truth. You should always assume when dealing with administrators that they will strain the truth to publicly enhance the value of their contributions, because they need to justify their salaries just like you and I do.
so what are the benefits that make it worthwile?
Don't rain on that guys Google Parade. He had to read three or four GOOGLES on the CIC and he mixed in some Latin just to poke his Big Brain Boner out a little further!