Commitment to Athletic Excellence

Big Ten Conference

A meeting of seven Midwest university presidents on Jan. 11, 1895, at the Auditorium in Chicago to discuss the regulation and control of intercollegiate athletics was the first development of what would become one of organized sports’ most successful undertakings.

Those seven men, behind the leadership of James H. Smart, president of Purdue University, established the principles for which the Intercollegiate Conference of Faculty Representatives, more popularly known as the Big Ten Conference, would be founded.                                                    

At that meeting, a blueprint for the control and administration of college athletics under the direction of appointed faculty representatives was outlined. The presidents’ first-known action "restricted eligibility for athletics to bona fide, full-time students who were not delinquent in their studies."

Eleven months after the presidents met, one faculty member from each of those seven universities met at the Palmer House and officially established the mechanics of the "Intercollegiate Conference of Faculty Representatives" or "Western Conference," later the Big Ten.

Those seven universities were the University of Chicago, University of Illinois, University of Michigan, University of Minnesota, Northwestern University, Purdue University and University of Wisconsin. Indiana University and the State University of Iowa were admitted in 1899. The Ohio State University joined in 1912. Chicago withdrew in 1946, and Michigan State College was added in 1949.

After a 40-year period of constancy in membership, the Conference expanded to 11 members for the first time in 1990, when the Council of Presidents voted to confirm its earlier decision to integrate Pennsylvania State University into the Conference.