Where Most Needed

The Big Ten Conference (EIN 36-3640583 Form 990) might be one of the most financially successful nonprofit consortiums ever.  After days of teaser & rumor stories in various places, columnist Teddy Greenstein in the Chicago Tribune reports that the group is ready to announce its sports network (with News Corp., also the owner of the Fox television network) and that it has agreed with ABC/ESPN on continuing its exclusive distribution for major sports events. 

Schedule A of the Form 990 informs us that the Big Ten earned $117 million in the year ended June 30, 2004 on sports revenue, chiefly from television.  The ABC contract is said to be worth $50 million a year.  The bulk of the revenue is parceled out in nearly equal $10.7 million grants to the eleven member schools (eleven since Penn State joined in the early 1990s).  In addition, the organization has a staff of 28 and pays its commissioner James Delany $438,109 plus a $66,544 expense account. 

The cooperation among the schools extends beyond athletics.  Students of collaboration might find more of interest in the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, through which the Big Ten schools (plus the University of Chicago, which deemphasized intercollegiate athletics after World War II) cooperate on a number of academic and administrative areas including: group purchasing, licensing of library & information resources, study abroad programs, large scale networking, staff executive development, and online course development. 

The CIC has no corporate structure, being organized instead as an office of the University of Illinois.  It has a staff of 18 headquartered in Champaign, Illinois and an annual budget of about $1.4 million, paid for by assessments on the member schools. 

The organization evolved slowly and never asserted any formal authority:

The first steps, naturally enough, were hesitant and tentative. Each of the 11
universities was a distinguished and apparently self-sufficient institution, proud
of its past and confident of its future.  Ironically, it was this go-slow approach which directly led to the strongest possible ties between the 11 member institutions of the CIC. There was never a thought of imposing a supergovernment on these distinguished universities to force them into cooperation, never a suggestion that the individuality of any member be sacrificed. 

Instead, each university named one top academic representative to the committee, which meets three times a year. Decisions of the majority were deemed not to bind the entire membership; a member institution of CIC may participate in any given program or not, according to its own needs and interests. Committee members are first and foremost the representatives of their own institutions, and the voluntary cooperation within the CIC in no way impinges on or complicates this basic responsibility. 

-From "A Case Study of CIC" (1967)

The loose organization structure succeeded where the formal alternative of interstate compacts (many of the members are public universities) proved too unwieldy.  Yet another factor was that each member organization had a great deal of confidence in itself and did not feel threatened by the cooperative approach when it served the organization's needs.