CIC Honors Executive Director Barbara McFadden Allen for Twenty Years of Service

 

 

The Committee on Institutional Cooperation is proudly celebrating Executive Director Barbara McFadden Allen’s twenty years of service to the consortium.

Allen joined the CIC in 1994 as the director of the newly created CIC Center for Library Initiatives, coordinating resource sharing, preservation, and electronic journal management for member universities.  In 1999, Allen was named Director of the CIC and in 2011, she became Executive Director.

Under Allen’s leadership, CIC universities have made tremendous strides collaborating to advance their academic missions, generating unique opportunities for students and faculty, and serving the common good by sharing expertise, leveraging campus resources, and creating innovative programming. Most recently, CIC universities have launched several very successful large­–scale collaborations such as the National Science Foundation-funded Professorial Advancement Initiative to support efforts to diversify the professoriate; UMETRICS, a groundbreaking effort to build and provide a data platform for large-scale systematic analysis of the infrastructure and outcomes of university-based science; and the Big Ten/CIC–Ivy League Traumatic Brain Injury Research Collaboration, which brings together the nation’s best experts to advance the research on concussion and head injury.

CIC programs and projects are extremely successful, due in large part to Allen’s knowledge of the complexity of the higher education landscape and unique ability to identify opportunities, shepherd development, and foster collaboration among the disparate needs, goals, and challenges of the fifteen member universities of the consortium.

Chair of the CIC Board and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost at the University of Minnesota Karen Hanson states,“Barb Allen has brought boundless energy and imagination, as well as deep dedication to her work as Executive Director of the CIC.  She not only keeps the many activities of the consortium organized and on track; she is constantly alert to new possibilities for cooperation and impact, and she is peerless in her ability to manage tactfully and productively the balance of independence and collaboration that is the hallmark of the CIC. Personally, she's funny, charming, generous, and smart as a whip, so it is a pure pleasure to work with her.  Everyone who is a part of the CIC, and everyone who has been touched by or admired the work of the CIC, knows how lucky we are that Barb is the Executive Director.”

A leader in higher education, Allen is the Vice President of the Association of Collaborative Leadership and previously served on the board of the National Consortium for Continuous Improvement in Higher Education. She has published, lectured, and consulted widely on building successful collaborations, global higher education issues, technologies for library and information applications and services, and digital information resources for groups such as the British Library, the National Library of Finland, the governments of Brazil and India, and the states of Missouri, Illinois, Virginia, and Oregon.  Most recently, Allen was a co-author of “Science Funding and Short-Term Economic Activity,” published in the journal Science.

Drawing on her extensive expertise, Allen plays a major role in international higher education.  A member of the Steering Committee of the Global Midwest Initiative of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Allen also serves as a leading voice for the Global University Summit, a gathering of worldwide leaders held annually in conjunction with the G8 Summit. Allen organized the Summit held in the United States in 2013, was on the 2013 London planning committee, and was a delegate to the Paris (2012) and Russian (2014) Summits.

As Kim A. Wilcox, Chancellor of the University of California, Riverside, and former Chair of the CIC’s Board stated, "Barb’s unbelievable ability to stay informed on every important detail, combined with her amazing political savvy and vision, means that the CIC is prepared for most every inevitability and responds appropriately when action is needed.”