Who is ACCA?
The ASSOCIATED COLLEGES OF THE CHICAGO AREA (ACCA) is a consortium of 16 private liberal arts colleges that was formed in 1966 with Mark Trumbo, Dean of Aurora College, as the chairperson. Jerry Baird of Argonne National Laboratory brought much of the energy and vision to the consortium until his retirement in the early 1990’s. ACCA’s primary objective is to promote collegiate education in biology, chemistry, computer science, mathematics, physics, psychology, sociology/anthropology, and business/economics by stimulating and regularizing cooperative arrangements between the member colleges and universities and government laboratories and other educational institutions in the use of staff and facilities. The first divisions to take advantage of the ACCA consortium were biology, chemistry, computer science, mathematics, and physics. The social science divisions of psychology and sociology/ anthropology became part of ACCA in 1986. The Business/ Economics division was added in 1990.
