The Big Ten Academic Alliance congratulates the Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) and the University of Illinois (Illinois) at Urbana-Champaign College of Education on receiving the 2025 Senator Paul Simon Awards for Campus Internationalization, presented by NAFSA: Association of International Educators. These prestigious awards underscore the universities’ remarkable dedication to global learning and the transformative ways they are shaping higher education.

For more than 20 years, the Big Ten Academic Alliance has been connecting students across its member institutions with instruction for “less-commonly taught languages” or LCTLs through its CourseShare program. While individual institutions may have difficulty providing multiple LCTLs to their students, the collaborative efforts of the Big Ten Academic Alliance allow students across the member universities to access instruction.

The Big Ten Academic Alliance proudly announces its renewed three-year commitment to the MIT Press’s Direct to Open (D2O) program. This innovative initiative, which has successfully reached its funding goal for 2025, will open access to 80 new scholarly monographs and edited collections, further advancing the global public knowledge commons.

In 2014, the Big Ten Academic Alliance highlighted Dr. Brian Burt, then an emerging scholar. Now, a decade later, we reconnect with Dr. Burt, now a Full Professor and Director of Wisconsin's Equity & Inclusion Lab (Wei LAB) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to explore how his early experiences have shaped his current work. His commitment to supporting Black males in STEM has culminated in the groundbreaking Black Males in Engineering (BME) project, aimed at addressing the underrepresentation of Black males in STEM fields.