Does anyone know how the Ivy League was chosen? The colleges/universities: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, the University Of Pennsylvania. I’ve read that they’re supposed to go have all been founded prior to the American Revolution, that that was the deal. But Cornell was founded in the 1820s, while there are a number of schools that predate the Revolution that aren’t “Ivies”, such as the College Of William & Mary and Rutgers. I’ve also read that the Ivy League was founded as a football league, yet obviously there were other factors at work. There are no Catholic Ivy League schools for one thing; and there are none from the South. All the “Ivies” are in the northeastern seaboard states. The “league” has not expanded since it began. There are many schools in the east that rival the Ivy League in quality that are not, for a host of reasons, Ivy League: Swarthmore, Johns Hopkins, Wesleyan, Amherst, Williams, Bowdoin, Bates, Tufts. None of the Ivy “rivals” predate the Revolution, yet Cornell made it and Amherst didn’t. Does anyone know the skinny on this? The Ivy League schools still possess a great deal of clout in terms of prestige as well as, obviously, quality, so the term has some meaning, and yet the refusal of the Ivy League to admit new members, Stanford, for instance, for a west coast institution, or the University of Chicago or Washington University for the midwest, is puzzling. Are the Ivy League schools deliberately holding onto their status for the purpose of prestige? Tradition? Snobbery? I’m curious if anyone has any answers, thoughts, on this burning question.
First of all, this should be in GQ.
Second, the Ivy League is just an athletic conference. Usually, athletic conferences are regional, because it’s easier to play nearby schools. It would make no sense for Stanford to be in the Ivy League because it’s so far away from the other schools that it would be way too time-consuming to travel back and forth. It makes a lot more sense for Stanford to be in the Pac-10, so its athletes play other West Coast teams.
I’m a grad student at a Big 10 university and one of my classmates in my program was on the basketball team last year (I never knew that grad students play in the NCAA before, but it was his last year of eligibility) and he missed a TON of school just traveling around the Midwest and at March Madness. He’s an incredibly good-natured guy, but it was pretty obviously really, really stressful. I wouldn’t even want to think of how difficult it would be for student-athletes if they had to travel 3000 miles every single week for a conference game.
Actually 1865. (I know the date since it’s my alma mater.)
The term Ivy League originated in the 1930s, and was originally a general category that included other institutions like Rutgers and the Army and Navy Academies. It became limited to eight with the formation of the current athletic league in 1954.
Kyla: you’re probably right about GQ. I chose Mundane & Pointless because it seemed to fit the subject matter.
Colibri: after posting I went to Wickipedia and typed in Ivy League, got most of the answers to my questions. The 1930s origin of the term genuinely surprised me, as I’d thought it was ancient. The reason I know anything about it at all is because my father was an Ivy Leaguer (Brown, Harvard), so I gleaned most of my info from him. It was a very big deal in his day, yet his time in the Ivies was either just before or at the beginning of the use of the term, so I figured it must have been around for quite a while longer.
The name wasn’t intended to define the entire set of older, well respected universities. It was just an athletic conference at first. The athletic conference was entirely in the northeastern U.S. It had to be a compact group of universities at that time because it was much harder to travel long distances. Nowdays there is nothing theoretically preventing an athletic conference from being spread all around the U.S., but at that point it was extremely difficult to travel every week more than a few hundred miles. The universities had to be approximately the same size to even out the quality of play. Thus a few older, well respected smaller colleges in that area weren’t invited to join.
After the conference was founded, someone noticed that the universities pretty much all had old buildings which were often ivy-covered, so they nicknamed the conference “the Ivy League.” It was only later that people began referring to older, well respected universities in general as the Ivy League. Notice that this group doesn’t include the (approximately) turn of the twentieth century universities like Johns Hopkins, Stanford, University of Chicago, MIT, Caltech, etc. The Ivy League schools were founded sometime between the colonization of the U.S. and the Civil War. They were more or less based on the model of Oxford and Cambridge. They were intended mostly as undergraduate schools (and, implicitly, for well-off students), although today of course they nearly all have many first-rate grad schools. On the other hands, schools like Johns Hopkins, Stanford, University of Chicago, MIT, Caltech, etc. were more on the model of German universities of the mid- to late nineteenth century. They always thought of themselves as places with strong grad schools in addition to strong undergraduate schools. This is because in the late nineteenth century, Germany became known worldwide as the standard for academia, so Oxford and Cambridge were no longer the model for top universities in the U.S.
Does anyone know if there is an academic component to the Ivy League (in the sense of formalized collaboration), or it if is purely an athletic conference? I know the Big Ten has an academic component, the CIC, which is composed of the 11 Big Ten schools plus the University of Chicago (an original Big Ten member). Wondering if the Ivy League has an analogous component.
Other way round. Check the Wiki link in my post. The name originated in the 1930s (“ivy colleges” in 1933, “Ivy League” in 1935), in reference to older ivy-covered colleges competing in sports. The Ivy League itself was not formally founded until 1954.