Ivy League

Menu

Origin of the name

The first usage of "Ivy League" recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary is from a sports-writer in 1933. Several sports-writers and other journalists of the era used it to refer to the older colleges, those along the northeastern seaboard of the United States, chiefly the nine institutions with origins dating from the colonial era, together with the United States Military Academy (West Point), the United States Naval Academy, and a few others. These schools were known for their long-standing traditions in intercollegiate athletics, often being the first schools to participate in such activities. However, at this time, none of these institutions would make efforts to form an athletic league.

The Ivy League's name derives from the ivy plants, symbolic of their age, that cover many of these institutions' historic buildings. The Ivy League universities are also called the "Ancient Eight" or simply the Ivies.

A common folk etymology attributes 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.^[9][10][11]

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 college football (which at the time, largely resembled what is presently called soccer). Though invited, Harvard chose not to attend. While no formal organization or conference was established, the results of this meeting governed athletic events between these schools well into the twentieth century.^[12][13]

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.

"Ivy League" therefore also became, like WASP, a way of referring to this elite, and elitist, class. This sense^[14] dates back to at least 1935.^[15] Novels^[16] and memoirs^[17] 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; in addition, the schools experienced the scandals of any other big-time football programs, although more quietly.^[18]