Ivy League

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Ivy League
Data
Classification	NCAA Division I-AA
Established	1954
Members	8
Sports fielded	33
Region	Northeast
States	7 - Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island
Headquarters	Princeton, NJ
Other names	Ancient Eight
Executive Director	Jeffrey H. Orleans

The Ivy League is an athletic conference comprising eight private institutions of higher education located in the Northeastern United States. The term is now also commonly used to refer to those eight schools considered as a group. In a wider sense, it is used to refer to the social group once strongly associated with these schools.

The term became ubiquitous, especially in sports terminology, after the formation of the NCAA Division I athletic conference founded in 1954, when much of the nation polarized around favorite college teams. The use of the phrase to refer to these schools as a group is widespread; Princeton notes that "the phrase is no longer limited to athletics, and now represents an educational philosophy inherent to the nation's oldest schools."^[1]

All of the Ivy League institutions share some general characteristics: they consistently place within the top 15 in the U.S. News & World Report college and university rankings; they rank within the top one percent of the world's academic institutions in terms of financial endowment; they attract top-tier students and faculty. Seven of the eight schools were founded during America's colonial period; the exception is Cornell, which was founded in 1865. Ivy League institutions, therefore, account for seven of the nine colleges chartered before the American Revolution. The Ivies also are all located in the Northeast region of the United States and are privately owned and controlled. Although many of them receive funding from the federal or state governments to pursue research, only Cornell has state-supported academic units, termed statutory colleges, that are an integral part of the institution.

Undergraduate enrollments among the Ivy League schools vary considerably, ranging from 4,078 at Dartmouth College to 13,700 at Cornell University, but they are generally larger than those of a traditional liberal arts college and smaller than those of a typical public state university.

Locations of Ivy League Schools

[edit] Members

All of the schools in the Ivy League are private and not currently associated with any religion.

Note Founding dates and religious affiliations are those stated by the institution itself. Many of them had complex histories in their early years and the stories of their origins are subject to interpretation. See footnotes for details where appropriate. "Religious affiliation" refers to financial sponsorship, formal association with, and promotion by, a religious denomination.

[edit] Shields and mottos

Brown University In deo speramus (“In God we hope”)	Columbia University In lumine Tuo videbimus lumen (“In Thy light shall we see the light”)	Cornell University “I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study”	Dartmouth College Vox clamantis in deserto (“A voice crying in the wilderness”)
Harvard University Veritas (“Truth”)	University of Pennsylvania: Leges sine moribus vanae (“Laws without morals are useless”)	Princeton University Dei sub numine viget (“Under God's power she flourishes”)	Yale University אורים ותמים Lux et veritas (“Light and truth”)

[edit] Origin of the name

Named after the ivy plants that traditionally cover their historic buildings (which, oddly enough, is found barely anywhere on the Dartmouth campus), the term Ivy League was first coined informally to refer to these institutions of higher education which compete in both scholastics and sports. Formally, it also refers to the association of these schools in NCAA Division I athletic competition. The Ivy League universities are often simply called the Ivies or, colloquially, the Ancient Eight.

Some attribute the name to the Roman numerals for four (IV), asserting that there was such a sports league originally with four members. The Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins helped to perpetuate this belief. The supposed "IV League" was formed over a century ago and consisted of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and a 4th school that varies depending on who is telling the story.^[6][7][8]

However, representatives from four schools, Rutgers, Princeton, Yale and Columbia met at the Fifth Avenue Hotel in Manhattan on 19 October 1873 to establish a set of rules governing their intercollegiate athletic competition, and particularly to codify the new game of football. Though invited, Harvard chose not to attend (Harvard, asserting that it would play under its "Boston Rules" would participate with this group in 1876). While no formal organization or conference was established, the results of this meeting governed athletic events between these schools well into the twentieth century. ^[9][10]

[edit] Before there was an Ivy League

Seven of the Ivy League schools are older than the American Revolution; Cornell was founded just after the American Civil War. These seven provided the overwhelming majority of the higher education in the Northern and Middle Colonies; their early faculties and founding boards were largely, therefore, drawn from other Ivy League institutions; there were also some British graduates - more from the University of Cambridge than Oxford, but also from the University of Edinburgh and elsewhere. The founders of Rutgers, in 1766, were largely Ivy; and so for many of the colleges formed after the Revolution.

Most of these seven schools were more or less Congregationalist or Presbyterian in denomination; Anglican King's College broke up in the Revolution, and was reformed as public non-sectarian Columbia College. In the early nineteenth century, the specific purpose of training Calvinist ministers was handed off to theological seminaries; but a denominational tone, and such relics as compulsory chapel, often lasted well into the twentieth century. Cornell has always been strongly non-sectarian, partly as a reaction to this.

The OED first cites "Ivy League" from a sports-writer in 1933. It was then a vague term, referring to the long-established eastern schools, which had very strong athletic teams, sometimes national champions; they could afford elaborate training grounds and athletic scholarships. They did not, however, form an athletic league. These colleges then had a smaller, and much more homogeneous, student body than they now do: male, white, largely from wealthy families of pre-Revolutionary descent (and so often of British stock), largely Protestant.

"Ivy League" therefore also became, like WASP, a way of referring to this elite, and elitist, class. This sense^[11] dates back to at least 1935.^[12] Novels^[13] and memoirs^[14] attest this sense, as a social elite; to some degree independent of the actual schools.

After the Second World War, the present Ivy League institutions slowly widened their selection of students. They had always had distinguished faculties; some of the first Americans with doctorates had taught for them; but they now decided that they could not both be world-class research institutions and be competitive in the highest ranks of American college sport.

[edit] History of the athletic league

The Ivies have been competing in sports as long as intercollegiate sports have existed in the United States. Boat clubs from Harvard and Yale met in the first sporting event held between students of two U.S. colleges on Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire, in 1852. As an informal football league, the Ivy League dates from 1900 when Yale took the conference championship with a 5-0 record. For many years Army (the United States Military Academy), Navy (the United States Naval Academy), and Rutgers were considered members, but dropped out shortly before formal organization. For instance, Army traditionally had a rivalry with Yale, and Rutgers had rivalries with Princeton and Columbia, which continue today in sports other than football.

Before the formal formation of the Ivy League, there was an "unwritten and unspoken agreement among certain Eastern colleges on athletic relations". In 1935, The Associated Press reported on an example of collaboration between the schools:

the athletic authorities of the so-called "Ivy League" are considering drastic measures to curb the increasing tendency toward riotous attacks on goal posts and other encroachments by spectators on playing fields.^[15]

Despite such collaboration, the universities did not seem to consider the formation of the league as imminent. Romeyn Berry, Cornell's director of intercollegiate relations, reported the situation in January 1936 as follows:

I can say with certainty that in the last five years — and markedly in the last three months — there has been a strong drift among the eight or ten universities of the East which see a good deal of one another in sport toward a closer bond of confidence and cooperation and toward the formation of a common front against the threat of a breakdown in the ideals of amateur sport in the interests of supposed expediency.

Please do not regard that statement as implying the organization of an Eastern conference or even a poetic "Ivy League." That sort of thing does not seem to be in the cards at the moment.^[16]

Within a year of this statement and after having held one-month-long discussions about the proposal, on December 3, 1936, the idea of "the formation of an Ivy League" gained enough traction among the undergraduate bodies of the universities that the Columbia Daily Spectator, The Cornell Daily Sun, The Dartmouth, The Harvard Crimson, The Daily Pennsylvanian, The Daily Princetonian and the Yale Daily News would simultaneously run an editorial entitled "Now Is the Time", encouraging the seven universities to form the league in an effort to preserve the ideals of athletics.^[17] Part of the editorial read as follows:

The Ivy League exists already in the minds of a good many of those connected with football, and we fail to see why the seven schools concerned should be satisfied to let it exist as a purely nebulous entity where there are so many practical benefits which would be possible under definite organized association. The seven colleges involved fall naturally together by reason of their common interests and similar general standards and by dint of their established national reputation they are in a particularly advantageous position to assume leadership for the preservation of the ideals of intercollegiate athletics.^[18]

The proposal did not succeed — on January 11, 1937, the athletic authorities at the schools rejected the "possibility of a heptagonal league in football such as these institutions maintain in basketball, baseball and track". However, they noted that the league "has such promising possibilities that it may not be dismissed and must be the subject of further consideration".^[19]

In 1945 the presidents of the eight schools signed the first Ivy Group Agreement, which set academic, financial, and athletic standards for the football teams. The principles established reiterated those put forward in the Harvard-Yale-Princeton Presidents' Agreement of 1916. The Ivy Group Agreement established the core tenet that an applicant's ability to play on a team would influence admissions decisions:

The members of the Group reaffirm their prohibition of athletic scholarships. Athletes shall be admitted as students and awarded financial aid only on the basis of the same academic standards and economic need as are applied to all other students.^{[citation needed]}

In 1954, the date generally accepted as the birth of the Ivy League, the presidents extended the Ivy Group Agreement to all intercollegiate sports. Competition began with the 1956 season.

As late as the 1960s many of the Ivy League universities' undergraduate programs remained open only to men, with Cornell the only one to have been coeducational from its founding (1865) and Columbia being the last (1983) to become coeducational. Before they became coeducational, many of the Ivy schools maintained extensive social ties with nearby Seven Sisters women's colleges, including weekend visits, dances and parties inviting Ivy and Seven Sisters students to mingle. This was the case not only at Barnard College and Radcliffe College, which were situated very near to Columbia and Harvard, but at more distant institutions as well. The movie Animal House includes a satiric version of the formerly common visits by Dartmouth men to Massachusetts to meet Smith and Mount Holyoke women, a drive of more than two hours. As noted by Irene Harwarth, Mindi Maline, and Elizabeth DeBra, "the 'Seven Sisters' was the name given to Barnard, Smith, Mount Holyoke, Vassar, Bryn Mawr, Wellesley, and Radcliffe, because of their parallel to the Ivy League men’s colleges."^[20]

[edit] Reputation

All Ivy League schools are known for their highly selective undergraduate programs, and acceptance rates now range from 8.6% for Yale^[21] to 24.7% for Cornell.^[22] These rates are far lower than they were up until the late 1990s. As late as 1992, acceptance rates ranged from 16% for Harvard to 47% for the University of Pennsylvania.^[23]

Although the Ivy League is usually regarded as a cohesive group from the outside, there is a considerable amount of internal academic rivalry and competition among its eight members. Among these elite universities, there is a heated competition for students. In 2002, admissions officers at Princeton logged into the Yale admissions website some fourteen times to view the admissions status of cross-applicants, using the names, birthdates, and social security numbers indicated on their Princeton applications; Princeton later asserted that it had been considering a similar system of early internet notification, and was surprised to find that Yale had used no password besides the Social Security number. Yale's administration notified the FBI about the actions after conducting its own investigation. Princeton moved one admissions official to a different department over the incident and the university's Dean of Admissions retired soon thereafter; as he had been scheduled to do.^[24]

However, at the same time, there is a great deal of collaboration between the member schools, with a student-led Ivy Council that meets in the fall and spring of each year, with representatives from every Ivy League school except for Harvard. At these multi-day conferences, student representatives from each school meet to discuss issues facing their respective institutions, with a variety of topics ranging from financial aid to gender-neutral housing.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Endowments

Main article: List of US colleges and universities by endowment

Total Endowment (listed by endowment market value as of end of fiscal year 2005):^[25]

• Harvard: $25.5 billion.
• Yale: $15.2 billion.
• Princeton: $11.2 billion.
• Columbia: $5.2 billion
• Penn: $4.4 billion
• Cornell: $3.8 billion
• Dartmouth: $2.7 billion
• Brown: $1.8 billion.

Endowment Per Student (as above, divided by total enrollment):

• Princeton: $1,678,000
• Yale: $1,326,000
• Harvard: $1,288,000
• Dartmouth: $470,000
• Brown: $236,000
• Columbia: $218,000
• Cornell: $185,000
• Penn: $184,000

[edit] Land ownership

(In alphabetical order)

• Brown owns 143 acres (58 ha) in urban Providence, Rhode Island and the 375-acre (152 ha) Mount Hope Grant in Bristol, Rhode Island.
• Columbia owns over 82 acres (33 ha) in Manhattan, which consists of the 36-acre (15 ha) campus in Morningside Heights, the 26-acre (11 ha) Baker Field athletic complex, and a 20-acre (8 ha) health sciences campus, as well as numerous individual buildings and properties. It is notably among the largest private landowners in New York City, third after the city itself and the Catholic Church. Columbia also operates the 157-acre (64 ha) Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York, and the 60-acre Nevis Laboratories in Irvington, New York.
• Cornell has the largest campus in the Ivy League with 745 acres (301 ha) of property in Central New York State (not counting the properties which compose the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City).
• Dartmouth, the largest Ivy landowner overall, owns 269 acres (109 ha) on its campus in Hanover, New Hampshire, and almost 50,000 acres (17,000 ha)^[26] in the rest of New Hampshire and Vermont, making it the largest private New Hampshire landowner as well. The College also co-owns two telescopes on Kitt's Peak in Arizona, as well as the Southern African Large Telescope in South Africa.
• Harvard owns nearly 571 acres (231 ha) in an urban setting (219 (89 ha) in Cambridge, Massachusetts^[27] and 352 (142 ha) directly across the river in Allston, Boston, Massachusetts^[28]) as well as holding a 1000-year lease (ending in 2882) on the 265-acre (107 ha) Arnold Arboretum also in Boston.^[29]
• Princeton owns 1077 acres (436 ha) for academic purposes in Princeton Township and Borough, West Windsor Township, and Plainsboro Township, New Jersey, as of October 2001.^[30] Princeton also has extensive investments in land elsewhere in Princeton.
• Penn has a core campus of 269 acres (109 ha), the 92-acre (37 ha) Morris Arboretum in northwestern Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and the 690-acre (279 ha) New Bolton Center veterinary research complex in suburban Philadelphia. On January 1, 2007, the University also officially acquires from the US Postal Service 24 acres of space adjacent to its current campus.
• Yale has a core campus of 260 acres (105 ha) in an urban setting, 515 acres (208 ha) in a nature preserve and golf course, 100 acres (40 ha) in athletic fields, and 30 acres (12 ha) in off-campus residential land, all in New Haven, Connecticut. It also owns significant tracts of forests and beaches in the area, among which are 10,880 acres of actively managed forestland in Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Vermont.^[31]

[edit] Cooperation

Seven of the eight schools (Harvard excluded) participate in the Borrow Direct interlibrary loan program, making a total of 88 million items available to participants with a waiting period of four working days.^[32] This ILL program is not affiliated with the formal Ivy arrangement.

[edit] Athletics & competition

Ivy champions are crowned in 33 men's and women's sports. In some sports, Ivy teams actually compete as members of another league, the Ivy championship being decided by isolating the members' records in play against each other. (For example, the six league members who participate in ice hockey do so as members of the ECAC Hockey League; but an Ivy champion is extrapolated each year.) Unlike all other Division I basketball conferences, the Ivy League has no tournament for the league title; the school with the best conference record represents the conference in the Division I NCAA Basketball Tournament (with a playoff in the case of a tie).

On average, each Ivy school has more than 35 varsity teams. All eight are in the top 20 for number of sports offered for both men and women among Division I schools. In some sports, notably baseball and tennis, the Ivy League teams also frequently compete against Army and Navy.

Harvard and Yale are celebrated football and crew rivals. Princeton and Penn are fierce, storied men's basketball rivals^[33] whose encounters over the last half century spawned the infamous "Puck Fenn" and "Puck Frinceton" t-shirts at games.^[34] In only six instances in the last 51 years (from the 1955-56 season through the 2005-06 season) has neither Penn nor Princeton won at least a share of the Ivy League title in basketball,^[35] with Princeton champion or co-champion 25 times and Penn champion or co-champion 24 times. Penn has won 20 outright, Princeton 18 outright, and 4 out of the 7 times Princeton has been a co-champion (and all of the four times Penn has been a co-champion), the other champion was Penn or Princeton. Less storied rivalries exist between other Ivy league teams in other sports, including Cornell and Harvard in hockey (either team has won or shared the men's title each of the last 5 years^[36]), and Harvard and Penn in football (either Penn or Harvard has won the title since 2000, and both teams have traded undefeated seasons since 2001^[37]). In addition, no team other than Harvard and Princeton has won the men's swimming conference title since 1972, with Harvard winning the 34 year series 19-15 as of 2006. Unlike most Division I athletic conferences, the Ivy League prohibits the granting of athletic scholarships; all scholarships awarded are need-based (financial aid).^[38] Since there is no outright athletic scholarship program, the schools are typically less competitive in football and basketball, even when compared to universities with comparably rigorous academic standards.

In the time before recruiting for college sports became dominated by those offering athletic scholarships, the Ivy League was successful in many sports relative to other universities in the country. In particular, Princeton won 24 recognized national championships in college football, and Yale won 19. Both of these totals are considerably higher than those of other historically strong programs such as Notre Dame, which has won 12, and USC, which has won 10. Yale, whose coach Walter Camp was the "Father of American Football," held on to its place as the all-time wins leader in college football throughout the entire 20th century, but was finally passed by Michigan on November 10, 2001. Currently Dartmouth holds the record for most Ivy League football titles, with 17.

Although no longer as successful nationally as they once were in many of the more popular college sports, the Ivy League is still competitive in others. One such example is rowing. All of the Ivies have historically been among the top crews in the nation, and most continue to be so today. (Other historical top crews include Cal, Washington,Wisconsin and Navy). Most recently, on the men's side, Harvard won the Intercollegiate Rowing Association Championships in 2003, 2004, 2005, and on the women's side, Harvard and Brown won the 2003 and 2004 NCAA Rowing Championships, respectively. The Ivy League schools are also very competitive in both men's and women's hockey.

The Ivy League is home to some of the oldest college rugby teams. These teams meet annually to compete in a tourney. The 2006 Ivy League Tournament was hosted by Yale, and the 2005 tournament was hosted by the University of Pennsylvania.

[edit] Athletic teams

• Brown Bears
• Columbia Lions
• Cornell Big Red
• Dartmouth Big Green
• Harvard Crimson
• Penn Quakers
• Princeton Tigers
• Yale Bulldogs

[edit] Conference facilities

[edit] Clothing style

Ivy League can also refer to a style of men's dress, popular in the late 1950s, and said to have originated on college campuses. The clothing store J. Press represents perhaps the quintessential Ivy League dress manner, with two of its four locations found at Harvard and Yale University. It is epitomized by the sack suit which is defined as being a 3-to-2 blazer without darts and a single vent. The pants are cuffed without pleats. It was also characterized by the use of natural fabrics, shirts with button-down collars, and penny loafers. In suits, the Ivy League style was promoted by clothier Brooks Brothers and included natural shoulder single-breasted suit jackets. In 1957 and 1958, about 70% of all suits sold were in the "Ivy League" style.^[40][41][42]

[edit] Other "Ivies"

Marketing groups, journalists, and some educators sometimes describe other colleges as "Ivies," as in Little Ivies; Public Ivies; and Southern Ivies. These uses of "ivy" are intended to compliment the other schools by comparing them to the Ivy League, but unlike the "Ivy League" label, they have no canonical definition. For example, in the 2007 edition of Newsweek's How to Get Into College Now, the editors designated twenty-five schools as "New Ivies," some of which— e.g. the four-year-old science-degree-only Olin College—share no characteristics with the Ivy League colleges except a good reputation.^[43]

[edit] See also

• Big Three (universities)—a term used to refer to Harvard, Yale and Princeton
• Colonial colleges—the oldest U. S. colleges, overlaps the Ivy League
• Jesuit Ivy—Complimentary use of "Ivy" to characterize Boston College
• Little Ivies—Group of U. S. liberal arts colleges that parallel the Ivy League in some respects
• Public Ivies—Group of public U. S. universities thought to "provide an Ivy League collegiate experience at a public school price"
• Seven Sisters—Historically-women's colleges with close ties to the schools of the Ivy League
• Southern Ivies—Complimentary use of "Ivy" to characterize excellent universities in the U. S. South
• Category:University organizations—other groups of universities

[edit] Notes

[edit] External links

• Ivy League Sports Official Website
• Harvard Website
• Princeton Website
• Yale Website
• Columbia Website
• Brown Website
• Penn Website
• Cornell Website
• Dartmouth Website