Academic Common Market

The Big Ten is an alliance of Midwestern universities dedicated to beating one another's brains out on the gridiron. Like the Ivy League, which football also launched, it may soon be known more for minds than for muscles. Last week the Big Ten schools, joined by an ex-member, the University of Chicago, agreed to link their graduate facilities in the world's biggest "academic common market."

The Big Eleven.* which together grant about 30% of the nation's doctoral degrees, have mulled the idea since 1957, when they formed the Purdue-based Committee on Institutional Cooperation, which aims to cut the rising cost of research rivalry. If one campus has a particle accelerator, for example, it makes no sense for another to duplicate it. Michigan is strong in Far Eastern languages; Illinois in Russian. Why should they try to match one another? By sharing the other schools' strong suits, each of the eleven will be able to strengthen its own for the benefit of all.

Already under way is joint research in bioclimatology (weather's effects on living organisms), a new field too costly and complex for any one school to excel in. The universities have even pledged to quit raiding one another's faculties for top professors during a May to September "closed season.''

C.I.C.'s new venture is a plan to allow graduate students to transfer freely among the eleven campuses. With 43,300 such students, the schools will give "C.I.C. Traveling Scholars" the right to use whatever facilities they need at any school, without having to register or pay additional fees there. A Northwestern anthropology student, for example, can now sign up for the strong Egyptology courses at the nearby University of Chicago. A pharmacology student at Ohio State can use the bionucleonic lab at Purdue. Physics students will gain access to the biotron at Wisconsin. Besides specialized schools and equipment, students will be able to seek out star scholars--Iowa's Space Scientist James Van Allen, Illinois' Nobel Physicist John Bardeen, Indiana's Geneticist Hermann Muller.

Some of the scholars will travel to host schools and stay a semester. Where schools are near one another, students can commute. "Each university has one or two departments that are tops in the world," says C.I.C.'s Director Stanley F. Salwak. "If we can get them to mesh, we'll have the greatest educational complex anywhere."

*Chicago, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Michigan State, Minnesota, Northwestern, Ohio State, Purdue, Wisconsin.

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