IVY LEAGUE: MUCH MORE THAN A SPORTS CONFERENCE, THESE ARE AMONGST THE WORLD’S BEST COLLEGES AND THIS IS THE UNOFFICIAL HISTORY

Columbia University

Established in 1754 as King’s College by Royal Charter issued by King George II, Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, research-intensive university offering degree programs from undergraduate to post-doctoral level. Located in uptown Manhattan’s Morningside Heights, Columbia is an academic powerhouse with a global renown. As the oldest institution of higher learning in New York State and the fifth oldest in the United States, Columbia’s story is deeply intertwined with the birth of the nation – originally located in a small schoolhouse in lower Manhattan, its purpose was to train the future leaders of the British colonies but instead produced many of the revolutionary heroes of American independence with alumni including Founding Fathers: Alexander Hamilton; John Jay; and Gouverneur Morris. Maintaining its tradition as an educator of American leaders, the college counts three former Presidents amongst its alumnus and another as a former President of the University. The university changed its name to Columbia College following the War of Independence and to reflect its patriotism to the republic and moved to its uptown location in 1897.

Whilst sometimes overshadowed by its Ivy League peers in the Big Three, Harvard, Princeton and Yale, Columbia is one of the most highly selective and academically challenging universities in the world with an international reputation. Undergraduates at Columbia College are required to undertake the university’s famous Core Curriculum¹³ which mandates a series of classes and compulsory reading for all Columbian students so that they may graduate with a broad intellectual education that focuses on holistic development of mind, body and character. The university’s various graduate schools are celebrated for their high research output which has profoundly advanced human knowledge and understanding.

As an ancient university, Columbia is known for its many unique traditions and customs. The university is an integral part of the history of old New York city and, alongside its sister school Barnard College, has played a seminal role in producing city, state and national leaders across politics, law, business and the arts.

The school has also played a significant role in the development of American sport, including the country’s favourite pastime of gridiron football. The Columbia Lions, alongside their Ivy League peers and rivals (such as Rutgers University), was one of the pioneers of the American football code. Indeed, Columbia played in one of the first intercollegiate football games in history against Rutgers in 1870. The Columbia Lions recorded a major sporting upset at the 1934 Rose Bowl, defeating Stanford 7-0. Columbia enjoys a fierce rivalry with Cornell (against whom they compete for the Empire State Bowl) and, to a lesser extent: Fordham University; New York University (NYU); Rutgers; Penn; and Princeton.

Columbia is an extremely selective school with an acceptance rate of around 4% of all applicants (and bear in mind that applicants are typically only the highest achievers). Columbia applicants have an average GPA of 4.18 and will be expected to have excelled in at least one major sport and have achieved a high standard in additional extracurricular pursuits, particularly music. The alumni list includes a glittering roster of distinguished Columbians, including royals, leaders of nations, celebrated personalities, and business tycoons.

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Cornell University

Cornell is often remarked upon as being the most unusual of the Ivy League colleges, owing to its later foundation and its curious public-private status as a college in receipt of significant state funding through New York’s state university system. Nonetheless, Cornell, known as “Big Red” was an athletic powerhouse throughout the early part of the last century and regularly scheduled games against the other Ivy League schools. The school garnered an early reputation as an academic luminary and, from its outset, was a rival to those big schools with a greater heritage. The school was founded in Ithaca, New York in 1865 by wealthy benefactor and industrialist, Ezra Cornell, himself of limited schooling, along with Andrew Dixon White. He set about establishing an egalitarian institution, non-sectarian and co-educational in ethos, a revolutionary counterpart to the existing schools. Cornell stated, as his foundational mission that he: “would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study.” An idea that has come to be known as the “Any Person” ethos. This was in stark contrast to the established neoclassical preference precedent where most American universities were for wealthy, white, Christian men studying the classics. Cornell and White wanted the university to be research-oriented but also fostering civic engagement and enhancing social and economic mobility. Furthermore, Cornell would cement this endeavour with stipulations that the school provide practical technical and scientific instruction in addition to the classics. Thus, Cornell would fast become renowned for its agricultural and engineering programs. Developing upon the “Any Person” concept, Cornell also embraces the “Any Study” approach, allowing the university to develop world-class facilities and research output in any area of study, hence the university is home to one of the world’s highest-rated hotel schools – an unusual feature of a leading private research university.

Thus, with the passing of the Morrill Land-Grant Acts¹⁴, Cornell’s unique expertise and faculty would attract significant funding under the New York State legislature’s land-grant program. Operating partially under the State University of New York system in respect of those constituent schools and programs that are in receipt of state funds, the school attracts both private and public applicants, making it the most socio-economically diverse Ivy. It is also why the school has been referred to as “the first truly American university” (a quote regularly attributed to the university but first coined by Frederick Rudolph in 1962)¹⁵ ¹⁶ ¹⁷ ¹⁸.

Owing to its later foundation and rejection of the neoclassical appetites of the established universities, Cornell has a beaux-arts campus, sprawling across the gorges of its upstate New York location. The beauty of its site often resulting in complaints about the hilly landscape and the regular climbs faced by students and faculty alike. Indeed, it was a Cornellian who coined the local slogan “Ithaca is gorges!” a pun referencing the region’s gorgeous geography¹⁹.

Like its Ivy League peers, Cornell has several unique traditions and superstitions which play a small role in college life. Cornell also boasts a vibrant Greek life scene, at odds with its peer schools who have made efforts to end Hellenic chapters on their respective campuses.

Cornell shares close relations with many universities and colleges across the USA and internationally, particularly through its Global Hubs Network (GHN) and its International Exchange partners. Whilst Cornell has always been a co-educational school, it once maintained a sister school relationship Wells College and even, at one point, sought to take it over. Students were able to cross-matriculate in certain subjects before Wells closed and, ultimately, its legacy folded into Hobart and William Smith Colleges²⁰.

Athletics have played a big role in the history of Cornell and, as compared to other Ivy leagues, are a much more significant aspect of campus life. Big Red played a huge role in the early development of American sports and the governing structures and codes of intercollegiate competition. Cornell dominates in ice hockey and wrestling but has strong basketball, football and rowing legacies too. Cornell enjoys an historic rivalry with the other Ivy League schools, particularly Harvard, Penn and Dartmouth. Cornell also has an historic rivalry with Syracuse University that became so fierce that all sporting competition was suspended for a time and, as the rumour goes, may even have resulted in Syracuse’s potential candidacy for admission to the Ivy League being vetoed.

Cornell is highly selective with an acceptance rate of 8% and the average GPA of successful applicants being around 4.18. Whilst Cornell’s acceptance rate is certainly higher than the other Ivies, admitted students likely have a GPA on par with the most selective schools in the nation. Cornell’s may have a reputation as being the easiest Ivy to get into is but is often regarded as one of the hardest to stay in due to the rigour and vigour of its academic program. As with their peer schools, applicants to Cornell will be expected to have a significantly broad range of extracurricular interests and activities, with a high degree of accomplishment therein.

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Dartmouth College

Dartmouth College, nestled in the scenic Upper Valley of New Hampshire, is known as “Big Green”, owing to its beautiful, leafy, upstate location. As the northernmost Ivy, and the least urban, Dartmouth balances a rugged, outdoorsy spirit with some of the most rigorous undergraduate teaching in the world. A full research university, Dartmouth’s refusal to change its’ name to reflect its output is a firm nod to its past and to its emphasis on its undergraduate liberal arts program. Many prospective students and, even, faculty, are drawn to the school due to its easy vibe, much more akin to the so-called Little Ivies than it is to its Ivy League rivals.

Dartmouth was founded in 1769 by the Reverend Eleazar Wheelock. It is amongst the oldest higher education institutions in North America, the ninth oldest in the United States and one of only a handful established before the American Revolution (the nine Colonial Colleges). Initially, the college began as a religious mission school, the successor to Moor’s Indian Charity School, intended to educate native American children in the ways of Western culture and Christianity (explicitly in the Congregationalist tradition). The school, well-endowed for its charitable purpose but struggling to attract pupils due to its location in Lebanon, faced a perilous fate. Wheelock determined that relocating to Hanover would be of great strategic benefit and sought to establish a new school using the original charitable endowment but focused moreover on the education of the Congregationalist colonial community. He petitioned for a charter from King George III and named his new school for his early benefactor, the Earl of Dartmouth. However, whilst Dartmouth was intended to replicate Wheelock’s earlier work, he was clear in that he sought to move away from the former school’s particular charitable purpose and focus on the provision of instruction to the children of European colonists in the ways of the Congregationalist faith, much to its’ namesake benefactor’s chagrin. Native American children were accepted into the school but with much less representation. To facilitate the growth of both school and community, Wheelock recognised that he would need to prepare young men for missionary work and for Ministry, thus Dartmouth would also become a seminary. In its new rendition, Dartmouth would receive its first significant donation from John Phillips, a major donor to Harvard and Princeton and who would later found Phillips Exeter Academy (and whose nephew founded Phillips Academy Andover).

The college faced substantial turmoil in 1819 when the State of New Hampshire initiated a takeover of the school and established Dartmouth University, a public university, on the Hanover campus. Dartmouth College refused to comply and relocated as a going concern to nearby facilities. At the instigation of a Dartmouth alumnus, the college successfully defended its position and had the State’s efforts overthrown in what has come to be known as the Dartmouth College Case (also known as the Small College Case, in reference to which the defendant’s advocate, Daniel Webster, stated: “it is sir, as I have said, a small college. And yet there are those who love it.” The saying has become gospel to the Dartmouth community despite that it may not, in fact, be accurate²¹)²². The case is oft quoted as established precedent in matters of contractual law with respect to the protection of private interests in matters of state overreach.

Dartmouth’s relative isolation has often been derided by rival Ivy students; however its location is also the source of its great strength and sense of community. Decidedly rural, the school embraces the surrounding wilderness with outdoor pursuits being a core part of student life. Indeed, Dartmouth’s motto Vox clamantis in deserto translates, roughly, to “a voice calling out in the wilderness”. The on-campus Dartmouth Outing Club (DOC) is the oldest adventure-oriented club in the nation and nearly all Dartmouth undergrads will be familiar with DOC cabins, retreats and excursions. The cold New England winters can make for long nights and hardship for campus residents, but this has also resulted in Dartmouth’s great traditions and high-energy celebrations which puncture the harshness of the snowy wintertide and which add to the fun and festivities the school has become known for.

Dartmouth’s insularity fosters a great sense of community and camaraderie, which has given it something of a reputation as a party school (certainly relative to its Ivy peers, perhaps, with the exception of Penn). Famously, the school served as the inspiration for Faber College, the fictional institution in National Lampoon’s Animal House (albeit this comedy was filmed on location at the University of Oregon). One of the movie’s co-writers, Chris Miller, is a Big Green alum, graduating from his alma mater in 1963²³.

This reputation, however, belies the truth of the Dartmouth experience. Dartmouth is an extremely rigorous school, requiring students to excel academically and contribute to the body of research material that the school is famous for publishing. As with similar colleges, Dartmouth has developed its proprietary curriculum known as the D-Plan, which operates on a unique, year-round “quarter system” consisting of four 10-week terms. Under the D-Plan, students have a wide range of choices and great flexibility to take “off-terms” for international internships, overseas study, or research projects whilst remaining on campus during the beautiful New Hampshire summers (the legendary “Sophomore Summer”).

Dartmouth has a proud athletic history too, with the Big Green often performing at a level greater than the relatively small size of the student body when contrasted with their Ivy counterparts. Dartmouth is a dominant force in winter sports, field games and outdoor pursuits. The school also has a particular pedigree in track and field and football, having won more Ivy championships than any other school in the League. Dartmouth’s early role in the formation of the Triangular Football League (being a member of the forerunner Northern League) shaped the development of intercollegiate competition in the United States, and not just in terms of gridiron football. Dartmouth’s historic football rival is Harvard, although rivalries against Amherst, MIT, and Trinity College shaped much of Big Green’s early football era. In hockey, Princeton is arguably Dartmouth’s biggest rival. Yet, today, Cornell is often billed as Dartmouth’s primary rival due to their geographic proximity within the Ivy League. Dartmouth also enjoys something of a sister relationship with Mount Holyoke College, one of the Seven Sisters schools. Dartmouth maintains close relations with other prestigious New England private colleges through the 12 College Exchange Program.

Dartmouth is highly-selective, accepting approximately 5% of applicants (similar to the Ivy average), the average GPA of whom tends to be around the 3.90 – 4.00 mark. Applicants are expected to have broad extracurricular interests and achievements to support their candidacy and to contribute to the Dartmouth community during their time in Hanover. Dartmouth’s smaller size, rural location and undergraduate liberal arts focus mean the school often competes more closely with New England Small College Athletic Conference (NESCAC) schools and other small liberal arts colleges. Whilst Dartmouth has many graduate schools and institutions and is classified as “R1: Doctoral University (Very High Research Activity)” under the Carnegie Classification, its research output is significantly less than peer schools, which often sees the school ranked below its’ Ivy rivals in national and international rankings.

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Harvard University

The oldest institution of higher education in the United States, and, undoubtedly, its most famous, Harvard is a globally renowned, highly selective and extremely prestigious private research university. Such is Harvard’s reputation; it is perhaps the most famous university in the world alongside its Oxbridge peers. The college was founded in 1636 as the New(e) College, only 15 years after the establishment of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, making it one of the world’s oldest universities. In 1639 the institution would be renamed for John Harvard, a Puritan minister from England and Cambridge graduate who was one of the colony’s early settlers and a founder of the University. Harvard died of tuberculosis in 1638 at the age of 30 and had bequeathed his entire library and a significant portion of his estate to the fledgling college. The college took up residence in the heart of the recently established colonial outpost village of Newe Town (the first properties of this settlement having only been built in 1631 and upriver from Boston Harbor and the town of Boston, founded in 1630). On the death of John Harvard and the renaming of the college in his honour, the residents of Newe Town elected in 1638 to rename their town Cambridge for the English university town where Harvard himself had studied. The original village site is the present Harvard Square. Many Harvardians refer to themselves as Cantabrigians, a Latin-derived term referencing Cambridge in England and which is applied to graduates of the University of Cambridge too.

Harvard College was never officially attached to any religious denomination; however, it was inevitably associated with the Puritan colony within which it was established and from whom most of its early students would come from. The college, as was the norm in the early modern period, did educate young men for the Congregationalist clergy to support their burgeoning community in this new world. The college became the archetype of the American education institution and the school to look up to for future establishments, including its closest rival, Yale, which was founded 65 years later.

With the expansion of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the influx of Puritan pioneers from the European continent, Boston grew into a large city, reaching Cambridge and beyond. The influence of its earliest settlers, many of whom traced their lineage back to the Mayflower, would grow therewith. The early New England arrivals, escaping persecution and the established sectarian hierarchy of England, would ironically emulate the same in the New World. The so-called Brahmin cast of Congregationalist and Unitarian settlers would dominate the political and cultural landscape of the American northeast. They would welcome into their clubs the Episcopal and Methodists, affiliated with the church from which they once sought refuge, against successive waves of Catholic migration. Harvard would become forever associated with this social elite, being the preferred institution for their young men and reinforcing their social exclusivity. Harvard, for much of its history, would be regarded as a bastion of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant hegemony that defined America in their image. So too would the other elite colleges of the United States, many of which comprise the Ivy League today. This image would prevail at least until the 1960s when a new progressive movement would change the landscape of American academia and slowly result in the decline of the WASP elite, thus that today these universities are very much more representative of a diverse, intellectual, meritocratic, modern America, with a distinctly international outlook.

Harvard’s impact on modern America extends far beyond its academic and cultural relevance, its story is also the story of those great American sports, basketball, baseball and, above all, football. Whilst it is well-documented that the first intercollegiate football game in America took place between Princeton and Rutgers in 1869, it was the Harvard vs McGill game of 1874 that gave America its first taste of what would become the gridiron game. The Princeton vs Rutgers match closely resembled the association football (soccer) game popularised in England and across Europe and increasingly played on American college campuses in the late 19^th Century. However, a new variant had emerged amongst English public schools, first played at Rugby School, and popular on Canadian college campuses. McGill University introduced Harvard to their version of this sport when they agreed the rules for their first intercollegiate match in 1874 and so began the nation’s most popular sport. Harvard would play their biggest rival, Yale, the following year and create the greatest and oldest rivalry in American sports, now known simply as “The Game”. This rivalry would manifest in a host of other sports too, notably “The Boat Race”, modelled on the Oxbridge tradition. Harvard’s other great sporting rivals would include Princeton (with Harvard, Yale and Princeton comprising the Big Three, competing against one another in all manner of sporting and academic contest), and Dartmouth, with whom a long-standing football rivalry exists. Brown alleges a great rivalry with Harvard too; however, Harvard men may believe otherwise. In the early days of collegiate sport, when the great research universities of today were still, themselves, small male-only colleges, Harvard enjoyed regular fixtures in sports and debate against the likes of: Amherst; Trinity; Tufts University; Wesleyan University; Williams College; and the Service Academies (the United States Military Academy “Army” and the United States Naval Academy “Navy”). Since the inception of the Ivy League, Harvard has also engaged in many fixtures against Colgate University and College of the Holy Cross, amongst others. Harvard once had a rivalry against Union College for admissions, which, at one point in time, was the third biggest college in the Thirteen Colonies, making a so-called Big Four with Harvard, Princeton and Yale. Harvard also enjoys rivalries with: MIT (their Cambridge neighbour); Boston College; Boston University; and Tufts, simply owing to their geographic proximity, academic excellence and competition for the brightest minds. Harvard enjoyed a sister relationship with Radcliffe College, one of the Seven Sisters, which was effectively co-located with and eventually merged into the university. To a lesser extent, Wellesley College was also associated with Harvard as a sister school of sorts.

Harvard once commanded a significant following, with a huge fanbase supporting their academic and athletic pursuits, however the decision of many of the elite colleges to eschew athletic scholarships, to not participate in bowl games, and the advent of televised college sports has seen much of that attention being diverted to major Division I Bowl Championship teams. Today, sports is a far less significant aspect of college life at Harvard and, indeed, its Ivy peers, despite that the university boasts the most extensive athletic program in the country.

The decline in relevance of collegiate sports may be a driver in the decline of school spirit and the bonds that underpin campus community²⁴ ²⁵. So it is that Harvard, once celebrated for its tight knit community, palpable immediately on passing the black iron gates into Harvard Yard, is sometimes derided as soulless²⁶, compounded by Cambridge’s gradual absorption into the expanding Boston city centre and the ever-present commotion caused by curious tourists.

Nonetheless, Harvard retains a rich history of traditions and quirks unique to its ancient campus, including a thriving secret society scene that has existed for well over a century and counts many distinguished luminaries amongst its membership. An academic powerhouse, Harvard is a research-intensive university publishing academic output at a level way beyond many of their closest peers. Harvard regularly ranks amongst the top five universities in the world, often vying for first place in the best recognised rankings. The university is a pillar of American intellectualism, borne of its driving mission: to bring the world’s brightest minds into a single square mile on the premise that this inevitably will lead to progress, a concept known as the “Yard” idea. Harvard also challenges students to focus on real-world problem-solving over rote memorisation, creating capable intellectuals with an applied understanding of their learning. The university also maintains the largest academic library in the world.

Harvard is extremely selective, attracting the best applicants from across the world. Admissions are on a need-blind basis and only 4% of candidates are accepted. It is the most selective of the Ivy League with accepted students maintaining an average GPA of 4.20. Harvard boasts an enviable alumni list, which includes 8 US Presidents and a host of international royals, business leaders, statesmen, diplomats, and first-in-class academics. Bizarrely, Harvard students are recognised as being of such a high calibre that even their college dropouts (including Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg) are often far more successful than graduates of other universities. Harvard has produced more American Presidents, more Nobel laureates and more Rhodes Scholars than any other university.

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Princeton University

One of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious research universities, Princeton was founded as the College of New Jersey in 1746 in Elizabeth. The college’s storied history began with a Presbyterian seminary in Pennsylvania that had come to be known as the “Log College”²⁷ and the Great Awakenings that would redefine American Presbyterianism and, indeed, Protestantism more generally. The established Synod of Philadelphia was the first Presbyterian judicatory in the American colonies and tended to favour a conservative interpretation of the faith – the so-called Old Light and hailing from the British tradition. The Synod’s preference for ordained Ministers was young men who had graduated from British universities or, reluctantly, Harvard and Yale as America’s only higher education colleges of note. New Light Presbyterians, proponents of the First Great Awakening, professed a different interpretation of their faith and the Log College would serve as a seminary preparing future ordained ministers for their community. The Synod would explicitly ban graduates of the Log College from becoming Ministers in the established church and so it would be that a group of New Light Presbyterians affiliated with the Log College would embark on the path towards obtaining a charter to establish a college of their own to rival Harvard and Yale and in keeping with the rules of the Old Light-leaning Synod²⁸. The College of New Jersey was granted a charter in 1746, relocating from Elizabeth to Newark in 1747 and, finally, to Princeton in 1756 for which the school was renamed in 1896 (although the college was referred to as, simply, Princeton for many years prior to the formal name change).

Princeton is the fourth oldest institution of higher learning in the United States, behind its biggest rivals, Harvard and Yale, and the College of William & Mary founded in 1693 in Williamsburg (Penn was founded earlier than Princeton but received its charter later). The college’s early history was marred in controversy; the very foundation of the school was opposed by the Anglican (later Episcopal) hegemony that had come to dominate the thirteen colonies, arguing that the college’s first charter was invalid²⁹. A second charter was later awarded, modelled on that of its two big rivals in the Northeast. The prominent founding families of the mid-Atlantic and New England states would elect to send their children to Harvard or Yale and, later, Union College and Columbia in preference to Princeton. However, many of the wealthy, early families and plantationists of the southern States would opt for Princeton over the other colonial colleges due to its relative geographic proximity. Princeton’s relationship with Patrician Southern families would result in the school earning the nickname: the “Southern Ivy”⁶ and conferring a degree of social prestige on the college. Nonetheless, it wouldn’t be until the late 1860s that Princeton would cement its status as a pillar of the American establishment and a darling of the upper classes. This was the era in which James McCosh served as the college’s President and ushered in a series of changes and upgrades to the ancient institution³¹. He expanded the campus, oversaw the introduction of the famous eating clubs (at the expense of fraternities and sororities which were ended under his tenure), allowed the development of various extracurricular clubs (including the colleges’ first football club), and conferred the first doctorates on select Princeton graduates. Princeton had arrived and would become the preferred destination for the well-heeled children of New Jersey and Pennsylvania (and becoming cherished by the Mainliners of western Philadelphia and its surrounds).

This era marked the augmentation of the status of the Big Three, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton: now the dominant forces in American education. By the 1880s, certainly, these schools recognised one another as peer schools and were competing against one another as they began to transform into academic powerhouses, full research universities with various graduate schools and research institutions, leaving behind their relatively small college status. They also began to compete against one another in sports, with the Big Three informally regularising their games through a triangular football league of sorts in that decade, with the Princeton Tigers proving themselves to be the team to beat, especially with respect to their basketball and lacrosse programs.

In fact, the very first organised game of intercollegiate football in 1869 saw a Princeton team take on nearby rival, Rutgers (at that time, also a small, private, men’s college with whom a merger was once proposed³²). A fierce rivalry existed between these two schools, a rivalry that still presents occasionally but has largely dissipated since the New Jersey State Legislature designated Rutgers as the state university in 1945. Princeton’s primary rivals today are Penn (its nearest Ivy rival), Harvard, Yale, and Columbia. Princeton, historically, shared something of an unofficial sister school relationship with Bryn Mawr College of the Seven Sisters, although, for a brief period, Evelyn College was its sister school proper.

College life at Princeton is defined by an intensely rigorous academic culture. The school sets extremely high standards for its students with a heavy focus on academic output from undergraduates. Princeton has eschewed expansion through various graduate schools as is typical of large research universities, in favour of its primary undergraduate mission. The Senior Thesis is a serious undertaking, akin to postgraduate-level theses in other universities. Princeton graduates are, consequently, highly acclaimed for their abilities and capacity to thrive under pressure.

Life on campus isn’t all work and no play, however. Occupying a rural location (less than fifty miles from New York City and from Philadelphia), Princeton has an insular community which has fostered some unique traditions and occasions. The historic influence of quasi-Aristocratic Southern dynastic families had a profound role in shaping Princetonian culture, decidedly more preppy than many of its Ivy peers. The intensive academics, power sports and isolated campus, coupled with a sense of gentility resulted in a legendary drinking culture at Princeton. Princeton drinking jackets (also known as beer jackets and occasionally listed on eBay or other auction sites), are a regular feature in graduate ceremonies (with each graduating class commissioning a unique version for themselves). These were originally worn to protect one’s attire from spilled beer at the raucous butteries on campus and at the various eating clubs (eating clubs are exclusive social clubs that are the epicentre of life at Princeton, and which have served to replace the fraternities that were abolished in the late-1800s). The eating clubs, on the surface, present a further sense of refinement at “Tigerland” – a civilised tradition evidencing the undoubted good breeding of the student body yet, as with the beer jackets, what’s behind the façade is often libertine and indulgent. Of course, as a modern and diverse university, the eating clubs have become far less prevalent in the lives of Princeton students, and the university has been at the forefront of efforts to create a more inclusive and vibrant campus.

Princeton admits students on a need-blind basis, selecting only the brightest minds from across the world regardless of background. Only 5% of applicants are offered places and those admitted have an average GPA of 3.95 or higher, making the university one of the most selective in the entire world. Subsequently, Princeton regularly ranks in the top ten universities globally in the most prestigious rankings.

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University of Pennsylvania

The University of Pennsylvania (better known as Penn) is one of the America’s pre-eminent institutions, a proud, private research university that has been serving the nation’s leaders since it was founded in 1740 by Benjamin Franklin. Franklin is one of the most famous figures in the early history of the Republic, a founding father, celebrated newspaper publisher and grand statesman who served as state president, Postmaster General and in various Ambassador roles. He was the first President of the University of Pennsylvania, subsequent to its foundation. Penn is the fourth oldest institution of higher learning in the United States; however, it did not receive its charter until 1755 when it first began instruction, thus both Princeton and Columbia are often regarded as being older.

Penn traces its origins back to the development of a lecture hall, built in 1740 to allow for visiting preachers to meet with, speak to and provide instruction to the evangelical Anglican community of Philadelphia. It was the largest building in the city and so began the University of Pennsylvania. In 1749, Franklin began petitioning for a public academy to educate the young men of the city with a somewhat radical focus on sciences in the academy tradition, contrary to the classics and rote learning standard that had been adopted at other schools. The College of Philadelphia received its charter in 1755 and began tutoring on the site of the great hall in that same year, with undergraduate courses from the outset. Unlike many of Penn’s peers, the school did not prepare young men for missionary or ministry work, having no seminary department. The college, despite its Anglican (Episcopal) origins, has been, officially, non-sectarian from the date of its establishment.

Philadelphia was the epicentre of the American Republican movement, serving as the meeting place for the nation’s Founding Fathers and, ultimately, being designated as the nation’s first capital after the American Revolution and War of Independence. A city founded by Quakers, Philadelphia had become known for its progressive ethos and values, radical to the conservative orthodoxy of the time. This spirit would be reflected in the mission of Penn with most the school’s early students coming from the Friends tradition. Indeed, the school’s athletic teams are known as the Quakers and the school collaborates closely with neighbouring institutions that are explicitly Quaker through the Quaker Consortium (including its unofficial sister school, Bryn Mawr).

The progressive spirit has defined much of Penn’s history: it was one of the first universities in the New World to develop on-site dormitories in 1765; received its first native American students in 1755; founded the first graduate medical school in the country, also in 1765; graduated its first Jewish student, Moses Levy, in 1772; opened the first teaching hospital in 1874; and the first graduate business school, Wharton School, in 1881. Penn has been at the vanguard of developments in higher education since day one – a testament to Franklin’s pioneering ambition and want for a learned community, a university that has only ever sought to elevate standards, advocating for scientific and technical understanding, and leading the way in professional education. All fundamentally driven by Franklin’s pursuit of “useful knowledge” as the means to advancing society³³.

Penn’s role in the future of the American Republic cannot be understated; note least the efforts of Franklin and his friends and followers, but also how they helped shaped a community of scholars sympathetic to their revolutionary zeal. Eight of the nation’s Founding Fathers were associated with Penn, including faculty and students, seven of whose names were signed to the Declaration of Independence. Penn also boasts an alumni list of old Pennsylvanians that includes two United States Presidents, three United States Supreme Court Justices and four who occupied corresponding offices in other nations, and numerous senior politicians and statesmen across the world. Furthermore, Penn has instructed and prepared many famous names in the worlds of business and industry, journalism, the arts, military service, government and diplomatic, science and technology.

Befitting of its ancient lineage, Penn life is beset with traditions and customs unique to the university, the most famous of which is the tradition of “toast throwing”, when toasted bread is thrown at the end of the third quarter of home football games (a play on raising a toast with a drink). Many tourists and visitors attend Penn games simply to observe or partake in this curious activity. Penn also celebrates an annual “Ivy Day” with the placing of an ivy stone on campus³⁴ (a class stone), a practice unique to a select few historic, northeastern colleges and universities and often posited as a contributing factor to the Ivy League nomenclature and etymology.

Penn also enjoys an active Greek life community, unique amongst the Ivies (only Cornell has a larger network of fraternities and sororities), which have been on campus since the 1800s. Fraternities on campus provided many of the earliest boarding houses for incoming students and have continued to play an important role in college life. Penn’s rigorous academic program combined with a thriving Greek life and tradition rich culture has earned the university as a “work hard, play hard” institution. It is often regarded, unfairly, as the party school of the Ivies³⁵.

School spirit at Penn is underpinned by a strong athletic program in which Penn has been a dominant force in intercollegiate football, especially in the early days of varsity sport, and basketball. Franklin Field is the oldest football stadium in the United States and the site of the very first broadcast game. Penn’s basketball stadium, The Palestra, is known as the “Cathedral of College Basketball”³⁶ owing to its status as host to more NCAA-sanctioned basketball games than any other facility in the country. Penn’s biggest rival is Princeton, with basketball matches being particularly hotly contested. Penn also has historic, though less significant, rivalries with: The Pennsylvania State University (Penn State); the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt); Drexel University; and the other Philadelphia Big 5 (LaSalle University; Saint Joseph’s University (SJU); Temple University; and Villanova University).

A veritable blue-blooded institution, Penn regularly features amongst the highest ranked universities in the world in respected national and international rankings. The constituent graduate schools and research institutes of the university are often recorded as the best in the world and the universities’ research output is highly acclaimed. As such, Penn is an extremely selective university: approximately 5% of applicants are accepted and those students typically have a GPA of 3.91 or above, in addition to a suite of extracurricular interests and achievements. Penn students come from across the world.

Read more here.

Yale University

A grand old institution, Yale is the Ivy prototype, the most “Gothic” of the Ivies with genre-defining curricula, a residential college system and the greatest impact on Greek life and collegiate secret societies in America. Yale’s beautiful campus is punctuated with towering stone spires, hidden courtyards, covert crypts, and gothic halls in which all undergraduates are required to reside. Yale offers a unique blend of ancient tradition and cutting-edge creative energy.

Founded as the Collegiate School in 1701, Yale was initially based in Saybrook where it was established by a collective of Congregationalist ministers who set about developing an institution that would facilitate and support their growing community. It is the third oldest institution of higher education in the United States and amongst the oldest in the world. Yale is one of nine colleges that were founded prior to the Declaration of Independence.

The school relocated to New Haven in 1716 and was endowed with a substantial donation from Elihu Yale, a Welsh merchant and governor of the East India Company. The college was renamed in Yale’s honour, despite that its namesake never visited the college. Even though the university bears Yale’s name and Yale students are often referred to as Elis, it was a later benefactor, Edward Harkness, whose legacy has had the most profound impact on Yale and whose name is, perhaps, most well-known amongst Yalies.

Harkness was one of the wealthiest men in America, an heir to a great oil fortune. A graduate of St. Paul’s School and Yale (so common a pathway that some detractors alleged the two institutions shared an unofficial admissions relationship)³⁷. Upon inheriting his father’s, and later his brother’s, vast fortune he became a serial philanthropist, giving substantial funds to various organisations and institutions across America. He gave generously to his former boarding school and to their great rival, Phillips Exeter Academy. He donated handsomely to the University of St Andrews in Scotland and, most famously, he made significant gifts to Yale and to Harvard with the proviso that these funds be used in the creation of a residential college system modelled on the universities of Oxford and Cambridge (and St Andrews for that matter). Harkness’s contribution would allow both universities to finance a significant expansion, embracing the collegiate gothic architecture so prominently associated with the Ivy League. In honour of his brother, Harkness Tower, the most prominent structure on campus, was so named. It is also for Edward Harkness that the globally recognised teaching methodology, the Harkness Table / Harkness Method³⁸ is named, devised at Exeter following his magnanimous bequest.

Yale also found backers and supporters from unexpected places, including several senior figures associated with their biggest rival, Harvard. Students and senior faculty, including Increase Mather, sixth President of Harvard, were finding themselves increasingly at odds with the broader trend towards liberalism in the practice of faith and study in Cambridge. In opposition to this direction, they put their efforts into championing Yale in the hopes that the newer school would become a pillar of conservative Protestantism. Increase Mather’s son, Cotton Mather, was the man who encourage Elihu Yale’s altruism.

Nonetheless, Yale’s history has been defined rather by its radicalism and progressivism as much as by its conservatism. The university has been heavily associated with the American Enlightenment movement and, at various points, liberalist theology and politics, being a hotbed of student activism, often compared to its British counterpart, the University of Cambridge. Like Cambridge, Yale also has strong connections to the establishment, being a preferred school for the elite and ruling classes and a recruitment ground for the state, most famously the intelligence apparatus and the various three letter agencies³⁹ ⁴⁰. Yale’s symbiotic relationship with intelligence services has been the plot to many conspiracy theories owing to the presence of secret societies on campus and the many alumni who have played senior roles in the operation of the American spy agencies and the surveillance state. Skull & Bones, the most secretive on-campus upperclassmen society is, ironically, legendary internationally.

Yale has a thriving secret society scene on campus, and the various organisations play a significant, although increasingly less prolific, role in student life. The oldest “landed” societies have their meeting places dotted about Yale’s old campus: expansive, windowless tombs wherein meetings and initiation rituals are conducted in great secrecy and have seen many famous names pass their hallowed halls, including many US Presidents and world leaders. These societies have effectively replaced Yale’s once thriving Greek fraternity system.

College life at Yale is dominated by the residential college system wherein all incoming freshmen are assigned to a residential college at random. Their college will be where their home and social life will be centred and the source of much intramural competition. The close-knit collegiate communities’ foster bonds for life and are the cultural heart of the university, however, unlike the British universities that these are modelled after, the residential colleges at Yale do not have independent authority. Located in downtown New Haven, Yale also benefits from a bustling nightlife scene and one of New England’s most vibrant culinary hotspots. The university also has a reputation for being arty, contrasted with its Ivy peers, with a strong tradition of performing arts and the list of alumni who have distinguished themselves on stage and on screen is staggering.

Sports have played a substantial part in Yale’s history and status, with some of the oldest intercollegiate athletic programs in the nation. Yale’s bulldogs, so named for Handsome Dan, the first live university mascot in America (an English bulldog that lives on campus and comes from a continuous line of the same breed since 1889 – the current incarnation being Handsom Dan XIX), have been monumental in the development of the country’s favourite sport: football. The longest rivalry in the sport is “The Game” – an annual fixture between Harvard and Yale that predates the Ivy League. It was at Yale that Walter Camp (“The Father of Football”) cultivated the sport and set out various rules and practices that have shaped the American Football game as it is today. Yale’s stadium, the Yale Bowl, a neoclassical construction from 1914, set the standard for football stadia across the country and was the key inspiration for California’s famous Rose Bowl. Yale’s early participation in a triangular football schedule with Harvard and Princeton and membership of the various Eastern Intercollegiate sports leagues and conference put in motion the formation of the NCAA and American professional sports.

With such a storied past and pedigree, Yale is one of the most sought-after universities for aspiring students. It is, therefore, extremely selective with one of the lowest acceptance rates in the country at 4%. Furthermore, incoming Yalies are expected to maintain an average GPA of 4.17 in addition to a multitude of extracurricular interests and a demonstrable record of leadership and community involvement. The university has many of the world’s leading research institutes with a substantial volume of peer-reviewed academic output, making Yale, consistently one of the world’s highest ranked universities with a name known all over the globe.

Read more here.

All eight Ivies are, undoubtedly, well known globally for their academic excellence and their high selectivity. If you consider that only the very best and most capable pupils will apply to these schools, you will also recognise just how ultra-selective they are, with less than 10% (and in most cases 5% or less) of all applicants are accepted. Please note that acceptance rates and the Grade Point Averages (GPA) of accepted candidates may vary year to year. The figures below are the most accurate that we could determine at the time of writing (updated in 2026).

	Ranking						Acceptance rate	Average G.P.A.
	ARWU	CWUR	QS	THE	USN (WORLD)	USN (US)	Acceptance rate	Average G.P.A.
Brown	101-150	71	69	65	150	13	5%	4.18
Columbia	8	8	38	20	10	15	4%	4.18
Cornell	12	14	16	18	16	12	8%	4.18
Dartmouth	301-400	45	247	180	326	13	5%	3.90
Harvard	1	1	5	5	1	3	4%	4.20
Penn	14	7	15	14	15	7	5%	3.91
Princeton	7	6	25	3	16	1	5%	3.95
Yale	11	9	21	10	9	4	4%	4.17
National average							70.8%⁴¹	3.15*

The Ancient Eight colleges are also heavily represented amongst the best in the world in all the major rankings and studies including the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) (AKA the Shanghai Ranking), the Center for World University Rankings (CWUR), the QS World University Rankings (QS) from Quacquarelli Symonds, the Times Higher Education World University Rankings (THE) and the U.S. News & World Report Best Global Universities (USN) rankings. Harvard, Yale and Princeton have consistently featured at the top of such rankings since ranking world universities first began. Of course, these rankings are often criticised due to the matrices that they use to assess universities, which can include graduate recruitment rates, peer-reviewed research output, academic qualifications of faculty and so forth. Such rankings typically favour only the largest universities that attract the highest levels of research funding and offer the greatest breadth of graduate schools. Therefore, smaller, undergraduate-focussed schools and colleges may be disfavoured in these rankings (which is certainly the case for Brown and Dartmouth – many of whose undergraduates may embark on Master’s programs at their larger Ivy rivals and thus boost the rankings of those universities at the expense of their alma mater).

Let us look more at the historical context which gave us the Ivy League and why these eight schools came to rise above the rest.

Background

Each of these universities, except for Cornell, were founded in the early days of the American colonies. They represent the various Protestant factions that had sought refuge in the New World, escaping persecution in Europe, pioneers building a new society in their image. The Virginia Colony, the first successful permanent colony established by the British, wasn’t even thirty years old when Harvard was founded in 1636, the Massachusetts Bay Colony in which it was founded was not even a decade old. A Puritan colony, Harvard’s early history in Massachusetts was dominated by the Congregationalist ideology and the community within which it was established.

It was nearly seventy years until Harvard’s closest rival was established. Yale was also founded with a congregationalist ethos when it opened in the Connecticut Colony. Over the course of the next century, nearly all the Ivy League schools would be founded. Cornell was established, later, in 1865. Only William & Mary and Rutgers claim a similar lineage to the oldest of the Ivies and these universities are collectively referred to as the Colonial Colleges. Over the century that followed, these schools would recognise one another as peers, the only institutions of note that competed to serve the emergent upper classes of American society⁴². Whilst many other colleges would follow in their footsteps (several of which have a lineage more ancient than some of the Ivies but were founded as high schools or female seminaries), few would enjoy the status and prestige achieved by their older peers. Of course, many of America’s older schools were founded to serve religious communities and maintained the classics tradition as their primary focus. Nonetheless, a select few colleges did rival the Ivies for prestige and reputation, and we shall explore those schools later.

This period in American history is intrinsically tied to the story of Protestantism and the First Great Awakening, with Christian evangelism and the trend towards deism profoundly guiding the mission and curricula of institutions of higher learning, especially those that performed a seminary function. Following the age of enlightenment and the age of scientific learning, successive waves of Protestant leaders were keen to find meaning in faith that would justify theological rationalisation for scientific and technological advancement. In essence, the great academies and colleges of the New World could satisfy their religious mission when providing instruction in natural science and emergent technology, useful to the industrialising economy.

Students flocked to these schools to access philosophical texts and ideas that were not easily available at a time of great religious and scientific zeal. The colleges were locked into an arms race to fill their libraries, and to attract the brightest minds and most learned professors to sate this burgeoning appetite. Religious communities were growing with migration from the European continent and the proselytising of the indigenous population, they needed ministers and missionaries, the political, social, and business elite needed educated managers, leaders, engineers and scientists to expand industry and governance.

The established colleges would cater as best they could to these competing and often opposed demands but doing so would often prove difficult with campus radicalism often threatening the viability of these establishments and causing tension within their surrounding communities. After all, these campuses were home to many educated young men, a long way from home and easily influenced by and susceptible to new ideas and movements. Successive administrations at schools and colleges across North America and across Europe were increasingly identifying a need to change how academic institutions were managed and the function that they performed.

Across the Atlantic, in the United Kingdom, a country which continued to play a significant cultural role on the early American nation even post-independence (despite being the opposing belligerent in the Revolutionary War) the British Public Schools and ancient universities were experiencing similar complexities. They were beginning to formalise their various sports and practices, codifying their student conduct expectations and developing broader, explicit curricula that would offer a more holistic education. Thomas Arnold’s time as head of Rugby School would be seminal in this transformation playing a huge part in the development of intramural and intercollegiate sports and the concept of muscular Christianity as a means for creating capable future leaders and harnessing the fervour and enthusiasm of young men in a community positive way.

A core element of this movement was organised sport. Rowing had been the dominant campus sport for decades, the first intercollegiate sporting contest in North America was the Harvard-Yale Regatta, contested in 1852 and better known as “The Race”, held annually since 1859. However, this noble sport was displaced in the later part of the century with the most popular sport of the early to mid 1800s being football, at that time a chaotic affair with countless variations, some quite violent. Football in the Americas was largely the same albeit more closely based on what would become the English game we now know as association football or soccer.

Students at many of the nation’s older colleges and schools had often played informal games adopting rules as and when appropriate or introduced by players. When the management of the schools and colleges embraced sport as a means of allowing the excesses of young men’s energy to be displaced, they began to organise games against varsity teams from their nearest rivals, and, soon after, travelled to play other schools too. The interaction between different communities began to result in a more homogenous set of standards and rules. The codification of association football in Great Britain would also heavily influence the prescribed form of play for intercollegiate football in North America during this time.

Whilst it is entirely possible, even likely, that games between teams convened from rival colleges had already happened, the first recorded match in the United States was a game that took place between Princeton and Rutgers in 1869. Rutgers beat Princeton by a score of 6 – 4⁴³. Both schools were relatively small, male-only, liberal arts focussed colleges who had already commenced a competitive rivalry academically and in basketball, amongst other engagements. The game was a success and the two colleges explored making the game a regular fixture (the two teams met regularly until 1978⁴⁴), inviting Harvard to participate. Harvard declined and the schools, allegedly, approached Penn.

Notwithstanding that heralded “First Game”, Princeton would play an erratic series of matches in the years thereafter, in part due to scheduling difficulties and finding commonality on rules of play. In the first effort to address these complications, representatives from Columbia, Princeton, Rutgers, and Yale met in October of 1873 to agree a stipulated set of twelve intercollegiate rules which would govern the college game and act as a reference for emergent programs at other schools⁴⁵. These rules were heavily influenced by the codified rules of the London Football Association, the forerunner to today’s game of soccer. Harvard declined an invitation to this conference and to agree to be bound by these rules as they had developed a rulebook of their own the year prior, which had borrowed aspects of the rugby variant. In this endeavour, Harvard was alone in the United States at that time.

Separately, the Canadian schools and colleges had shown a preference for a football variant inspired by the game played at Rugby School, and with more resemblance to the rugby football game than even Harvard’s own style. Similar to the British public schools which had embraced this variant and its unique structure which would afford a role to all young men, irrespective of their size and stature and, daresay, their athleticism, the rugby game proved popular amongst the grand institutions in Upper and Lower Canada (roughly corresponding to modern day Ontario, Québec) and the Maritime provinces of New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. With their peer schools having agreed a different set of rules, Harvard would be forced to look north to their Canadian peers to find competitors. Thus, when McGill University would visit Harvard in 1874 for a two-game football showcase, they would play the first under the Harvard Crimson’s “Boston game” rules and the second based on their preferred rugby style game. The rugby variant was immediately popular and would change American football forever more, evolving into the gridiron game we know today.

The game would become popular on American campuses, with Harvard, Yale and Princeton, known as the Big Three, competing against one another in an occasional triangular scheduling arrangement beginning in the 1880s but with an accord on regular play starting in 1906.

The sport would develop rapidly through the 1880s, most notably at Yale where student-player and then coach, Walter Camp (Yale ’81), the “Father of Football”⁴⁶, would introduce numerous changes and rules to the game which proved popular on other campuses and would give the American sport its unique style of play. He brought in the line of scrimmage and the concept of downs⁴⁷ ⁴⁸. He also coached some of the sport’s most celebrated players including John Heisman, Pop Warner and Curly Lambeau⁴⁹. Camp would also champion his proprietary training and conditioning methodologies⁵⁰, including a daily calisthenics program⁵¹.

Recognising a need to consolidate and codify their burgeoning sport, coupled with its widespread adaptation at colleges and universities opening across the country, directors of the early college football programs would begin to formalise a standard rulebook. The early game was extremely physical, often described as “brutal”⁴⁵, and college administrators were concerned about the levels of violence demonstrated.

In 1876, representatives from Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, met to decide on new universal rules, a conference known as the “Massasoit Convention”, for the location of the meeting in Massachusetts⁵³. The four colleges agreed a new set of rules governing intercollegiate football between themselves which leaned heavily into the rugby style game played at Harvard. The rules were quickly adopted by colleges across the country who would peg their own game to rule changes agreed at future meetings. The new rules would dictate competition in the Intercollegiate Football Association, which now included Columbia and Harvard. The Massasoit Convention would meet annually with Walter Camp first attending in 1878 where he proposed reducing the number of players from fifteen to eleven (in the first Princeton v Rutgers game each team fielded twenty-five players!) Camp would propose his other ideas in following years including the introduction of the line of scrimmage, the snap and the concept of downs. Jay Greenberg (2019) gives a great synopsis of the early chaotic development of the sport and the role of Princeton in that period⁵⁴, including burst balls, tactical adjustments, wanton violence and more.

In 1885, discussions between Amherst, Dartmouth and Williams began towards the formation of the New England Intercollegiate Triangular League (the Triangular League) in which the three colleges would play against one another in various varsity sports. At that time, Dartmouth did not have a football program. Dartmouth would, however, set about establishing a football team. In 1886, Amherst, Dartmouth, MIT, and Trinity formed the Northern League⁵⁵ (also called the Northern Intercollegiate Football Association and sometimes the Northeastern Intercollegiate Football Association (NIFA)) which would include the football component of the Triangular League. The following year Dartmouth would play scheduled football games, fielding teams for two competitive matches that year, both of which were against Amherst. Dartmouth’s inability to field a regular team in the initial seasons would see the Northern League based around: Amherst; MIT; Tufts; and Williams⁵⁶ ⁵⁷. The conference would be intermittently referred to as the Eastern Intercollegiate Football Association (certainlu it was in 1887) and would see Dartmouth finally scheduled to play, with the additions of Trinity and Stevens Institute of Technology. Williams and Tufts did not participate in that year. Williams rejoined the following year in 1888. Stevens dropped and Bowdoin College joined in 1890, before returning to take Bowdoin’s place in 1891. It then became the New England Intercollegiate Football Association / Triangular Football League in 1892 with just Amherst, Williams and Dartmouth. Dartmouth dropped out in 1899 and Wesleyan joined. The conference formally ended in 1901 with a dispute about the eligibility of baseball players who had been in receipt of payment during the summer. In 1910, those three colleges would reform a competitive football league which came to be referred to as the Little Three (a play on the Big Three reference to Harvard, Yale and Princeton). These colleges would also be known as the Triumvirate.

The Northern League (and its various iterations) was the first football conference proper in the United States. The Intercollegiate Football Association that formed at the Massasoit Convention was more of a rules board than a conference with scheduled fixtures. The Northern League also included the first ever college football play-off games which MIT lost to Williams (18 – 10) in 1885⁵⁸, having beaten Amherst 80 – 0 to tie with Williams for the league title. The members of these conferences would continue to play games outside of this schedule against other colleges across the Northeast. MIT famously lost such a match to Yale the following year, beaten 96 – 0 in 1886.

Dartmouth, despite Big Green’s indifferent entry into football, would come to dominate these early conference arrangements, much to the chagrin of the other participants. The student body at the Hanover college was expanding faster than their peers and they were becoming quite the athletic powerhouse. Dartmouth was forced to begin exploring other options for regular competitive play in all sports, especially football. They would start to participate in matches and meets against some of the region’s larger schools, including: Harvard; Yale; Princeton; Brown; Columbia; and Cornell.

In 1891, Cornell would play its first football game against upstate New York rivals, Syracuse which would begin a fierce rivalry that would last for decades⁵⁹. Cornell won that game 68 – 0. Their first basketball match would be in 1901, and lacrosse – the main source of their current rivalry, in 1920.

Over the coming decades, these colleges would continue to meet sporadically in a series of athletic meetups, including football and other sports. In 1901, the Eastern Intercollegiate Basketball League (EIBL) would be established which saw: Columbia; Cornell; Harvard; Princeton; and Yale as its founding members. Penn joined shortly thereafter and Dartmouth by 1911. In this pre-war and interwar period, the Ivies and their peers remained relatively small, private, male-only institutions with a core focus on liberal arts undergraduate programs. Various other conferences would be set up in all manner of sports (we will dive deep into these Ivy League predecessor leagues shortly) which would see, largely, the same group of colleges taking part. These would help shape the future Ivy League and its ultimate membership.

Football, however, was left alone. The nation’s favourite sport, the early game was dominated by the Big Three, which newspapers invariably referred to as HPY/HYP since at least 1878 when the three colleges formally constituted a three-way football tournament (which would come to be called the Big Three by the press shortly thereafter⁶⁰). These colleges were regularly voted as national champions (various rankings and selections took place during these years with sports reporters nominating teams as champions). Indeed, taking the first 25 years of the collegiate sport and its irregular early seasons, Princeton was voted national champion 16 times, Yale won 13 and Harvard took 2 titles. Penn finally broke the Big Three’s chokehold on the game when they took their first title in 1894, the same year in which Harvard and Yale suspended contest between themselves across all sport following “The Springfield Massacre” (a game also known as the “Hampden Park Blood Bath”⁶¹.

At the early age of American football, and with little competition from other organised sport, the pigskin game dominated the national interest, and the Big Three dominated the press coverage and won over the sport’s fanbase. The 1905 contest between Harvard and Yale drew over 43,000 spectators to Cambridge where the visiting Bulldogs beat the Crimson 6 – 0⁶².

These games were highly profitable to the colleges and, despite significant concerns about injuries, sponsored violence, and rumoured abuses of admissions policies, schools were reluctant to rock the boat on these lucrative revenue streams. Having the capacity to organise exhibition games and matches against emergent powerhouses was of great value to the various sporting directors. Smaller schools were reluctant to regularise games against the big teams for fear of upsetting their own revenue potential.

Yet, whilst this game would surge in popularity, the unmitigated violence and brutality of some matches was a source of great consternation to academic faculty and senior management. The Napoleonic-inspired “Flying Wedge”⁶³ offensive play was particularly violent and destructive and had rapidly become the go-to formation for offensive lines, after its introduction in 1892 by Harvard in a match against Yale⁶⁴. The hardcore nature of this emergent sport would further attract the concern and attention of senior lawmakers, not least President Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt, Jr. (Harvard ’80). Roosevelt laid down an ultimatum requiring that colleges bring in major changes or his government would. In the 1905 season alone, 18 students died in heavy contact and a further 149 were recorded as having sustained serious injury⁶⁵. Coupled with ongoing disputes over eligibility requirements, devious recruitment practices and suggestions of poor sportsmanship, collegiate sport was becoming a new frontier in the American story, an ungoverned “Wild West”. Columbia’s administration made the decision to terminate their football program that year over fears that students’ lives were threatened by participation.

In 1905, Roosevelt established a commission to review the flourishing sport, and interscholastic competition generally, with a view to developing a national standard, governed by a national rules-based organisation. He convened a meeting at the White House at which Harvard, Yale and Princeton attended, which resulted in the formation of the Football Rules Committee. Roosevelt would later endorse a further meeting that same year involving the representatives of fourteen colleges, which would result in the formation of the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States (IAAUS). Whilst we shall explore the foundation of this organisation in more depth later, it is worth noting that some members of the Intercollegiate Football Association saw the body as a threat to their sport and to their stranglehold on the governance thereof. However, Dartmouth and Penn were both charter signatories of the IAAUS, as was Rutgers⁶⁶ alongside many of the future Ivies’ peer schools. This body would change its name a short time later, in 1910, to become the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), reflecting its nationwide status and governing role in collegiate sports, now with many more members from across the country. A rule-setting organisation, the NCAA would establish championships from the 1921 season onwards, effectively sidelining the practice of national champions being determined by vote. This would mark the first substantial challenge to the dominance of the Big Three and their regular competitors. This move would also have a profound impact on the football landscape as more colleges sought to capitalise on the financial gains from operating a successful football program and would flout rules to use monetary incentives to recruit players.

Formalised college sports and greater moves towards a universal education, particularly through the state chartering of public universities, would further challenge the dominance and position of the older, established order. These newer colleges, often with state-of-the-art facilities and generous inducements for incoming athletes (within the rules, of course, except where some were not), began to develop seriously competitive programs that were beginning to outshine that of their predecessors and the early pioneers of the sport. Privately, some of the older colleges resented this changing tide and the increasing focus on student athletics over student academics. A real concern was presenting as to what a college or university’s primary role should be, and faculty were often openly hostile towards the efforts to find routes to graduation for sports stars who might not otherwise pass muster. Rumours swirled of cynical efforts by sports directors to encourage transfers into their programs in order to bolster their teams, win big games and earn big money⁶⁷. Donations to school endowments and alumni fundraising efforts were increasingly being linked with athletic performance rather than academic accolades.

The turmoil of the two Great Wars would create further difficulties for the sector as their core customer base of young men were now out to war to fight on behalf of the nation. Many of whom would make the ultimate sacrifice in defence of our freedoms and ideals. Many smaller colleges were finding themselves in a fight for relevance, if not survival, with heavily decreased enrolment numbers against a backdrop of greater academic choice and fewer target students. The exception being the service academies who, at one point had shared the consternation of their ancient peers regarding athletic scholarships and the impact on educational quality but now found themselves dominant forces in collegiate sport once again as hundreds and thousands of young men signed up to their respective service branches. An athletic arms race saw many big schools competing to recruit transfers from the sports programs of Army and Navy. For the others, the need to develop relationships and status through consortia, academic demarcation and athletic conferences was becoming apparent.

In 1944, the Federal Government passed the first of a series of legislative acts, collectively referred to as the GI Bill⁶⁸. These were intended to confer rights on veterans of the wars who had distinguished themselves in service of country. Under these measures, veterans would be able to access heavily funded degree programs at a university of their choice. Colleges would swell in size to a level never seen before on the North American continent. Big schools quickly evolved into massive universities, attracting research grants and opening various new constituent schools and institutes. The supply of enthusiastic, fit young men returning from the trenches and eager to engage in varsity sport would change the nature of their collegiate athletic programs also.

NCAA sanctioned athletics had become even more competitive and many of the member schools were pushing to further elevate the stats of collegiate sport to an even higher level as the revenue potential grew. This was the age of television, but also the advent of the professional era of sports, as professional major and minor leagues were organising on a national scale and locking in media contracts which would harm the market dominance of college sports. The existing NCAA single-division structure was holding back the larger programs who wanted to compete on a grander scale against other big beast schools. Advances in rail, road and air transport made the distances between schools much smaller than they had ever been before, teams could play away and return home within a day: they were no longer geographically restricted and no longer had need to focus on contests with their neighbouring schools.

A movement to restructure the NCAA and allow for major college sports programs was growing, the big schools wanted it, the student-athletes wanted it, the professional leagues wanted it (to the extent that it would incubate talent and produce future stars), and the fans wanted it. An increasing cohort of academic leaders did not for fear that academia would be forever destroyed by the dominance of sports over learning. Many older schools with a reputation built upon their academic pedigree resisted effort towards full-ride scholarships for student-athletes and other measures to attract sportsmen to their campuses in preference to the most academically capable students. Increasing pressure to relax admissions standards for big name football players was already transforming the student dynamic and putting athletes on a metaphorical pedestal, with undesired consequences and occasional toxic egotistic behaviour. Professors and administrative staff too had grave concerns about the trend towards play-off games and championship bowls that, whilst financially lucrative, would mean students participating in major, season-defining games during their final assessments and exams.

Nevertheless, the tide was turning and the secretariat of the NCAA allowed for a series of changes beginning in the 1956-57 season which would split sports into a two-tier divisional structure, becoming the three-tier structure we know today (albeit with the top-tier subsequently splitting into the bowl and championship divisions). Thus, whilst an Ivy League conference had been hypothesised for decades and various sporting associations having already been formed which would, ultimately, be absorbed into the Ivy league, it was the changes in NCAA-sanctioned football that would coalesce the relevant administrators, cementing them to the idea of incepting a formal, permanent arrangement. The history of the Ivy League is, a history of college sport and, especially, a history of American football and the game that came to be the nation’s favourite sport.

History

In response to the rapidly changing collegiate athletics landscape and the rise of the major conferences, the Ivy League was instituted in 1954⁶⁹ as a sports association bringing together the various varsity-level athletics programs of the eight Ivy League schools.

It was the manifestation of a project that began much earlier with the Big Three arrangements of the 1900s, but, more precisely, with the Ivy Group Agreement of 1945 – an informal pact to which the eight Ivies subscribed which would deemphasise athletic dominance on their campuses. The agreement would reaffirm the Presidents’ commitment to amateur athletics in an age of increasing professionalism.

This pact would be formally instituted in 1954 when the Ivy Group pledged to retain a ban on spring practice in football, a ban on athletic scholarship and a ban on bowl game or all-star exhibition games attendance – a practice established by Dartmouth who refused to participate in the Rose Bowl in 1937 believing that the football season should end before Thanksgiving so as not to interfere with students’ studies and exams and that a university’s primary function is to be a place of academic learning⁷⁰. This position would remain steadfastly until 2024 when the Ivy Presidents agreed to relax their rules on bowl eligibility and participation with Harvard and Yale debuting for the Ivy League in 2025⁷¹.

Moreover, the Ivy Group pledged to support a round-robin football schedule, with the format subsequently being rolled out into other varsity sports. The league was slated to formally commence in 1956 and, they naively hoped, would set a new standard for collegiate athletics.

The Ivy Group Agreement of 1945 was, of course, the formal coalescence of ideas that had come to dominate discussions amongst the senior leadership of a host of established Northeastern colleges and universities, inspired by the Harvard-Yale-Princeton Agreement of 1916 (often called the Triple Agreement, the Triple Alliance Agreement or the Big Three Agreement). The Big Three had regularly played against one another since the earliest days of football in America and reached a consensus on governing rules as early as the Massasoit Convention of 1876 (Princeton and Yale contested their first game in 1873; Harvard first met Yale in 1875; and Harvard and Princeton’s first match took place in 1877). However, it was not until 1906 that the three colleges set about with a regular schedule for their triangular conference with specific measures introduced to reduce violence in their game. This initial agreement was incepted at the behest of President Theodore Roosevelt (Harvard ‘1880) who was personally invested in the development of the sport and relations between his alma mater and their rival schools. The Springfield Massacre and other similar happenings had brought the colleges into some disrepute and was souring relations between the schools and their student bodies which could well inflict contagion in the heart of America’s ruling class, many of whose members would likely have attended one of these elite schools and would share their allegiances and rivalries. He called for a meeting of the Big Three in 1905 to break the impasse and forge a new cooperative direction for the sport which would mitigate the violence and improve the relationships between the three schools. These arrangements would be underpinned by way of a formal covenant when the three colleges set out their agreement of 1916.

The 1916 Agreement was the vision of former Princeton President, Woodrow Wilson (Princeton ‘1879) and now President of the Republic, who sought to build upon those earlier efforts to formalise consensus on the rules of play and eligibility to mitigate violence in the sport of football, following the demands of President Roosevelt and the rising tide of criticism facing the sport due to its extremity and wanton hooliganism. Wilson’s first efforts towards this agreement would begin in earnest in 1909 whilst he was still serving as Princeton’s President, however it would not be passed until after Wilson’s departure from Princeton, whilst he himself served as the 28^th President of the Republic. The Big Three would determine a set of rules which would set a precedent for collegiate athletics going forward. Athletes would be required to be bona fide students at each participating college and would need to meet the proscribed academic standards. Freshmen would be barred from competing at varsity level and all athletes would be banned from being compensated for their efforts.

The agreement would be extended in 1923 with the Three President’s Agreement⁷², an addendum to the original compact, which would stipulate rules governing scouting, scholarships and financial inducements. This tripartite entente would be short-lived with Princeton withdrawing from the arrangements following a dispute with Harvard over perceived aggressions and disrespect towards the younger college, a manifestation of years of a dismissive attitude towards the Tigers from the Crimson⁷³, and which would be compounded by Princeton having completely and humiliatingly shutout Harvard for three consecutive games by a cumulative score of 82 – 0. Princeton’s repeated dominance over Harvard in the years prior only exacerbated the building acrimony.

This ill-will would reach its zenith in two editions of the Harvard Lampoon which slated their New Jersey rivals which came to be known as the “Lampoon Affair” and which would result in Princeton’s act of protestation⁷⁴. Many commentators had noted that the HYP/Big Three moniker was not treated seriously by the Cantabrigians of Harvard who did not see Princeton as a peer school in the way that Yale was. The Big Three term featured much more prominently in Princeton’s promotional material than it did the other two schools. For the next eight years, the two schools refused to compete against one another, with Big Three competition being suspended, although both teams would play regular games against Yale.

Yale was at risk of being left out in the cold because of the frosty relationship between their two biggest rivals. Thus, embracing the trilateral conference and the building of a framework for the government of varsity sport, Yale sought, in 1927, to lock-in the existing structure with bilateral agreements with both Harvard and Princeton that would, effectively, continue the conference (albeit without a Harvard v Princeton element)⁷⁵ ⁷⁶.

With Yale’s strategic and deft diplomacy, the Big Three competition would limp on despite these early hiccoughs and, ultimately, relationships between the schools would thaw and allow for a future concordat and an alliance that would come to last decades. Of course, the hostilities that had shaped the foundation of the Big Three conference were not without consequence, and the suspension of competition greatly hurt the schools’ respective dominance of the sport as other colleges and universities across the nation rose to fill the void.

Certainly, other schools and colleges across the United States had readily embraced the sport that was once the preserve of the Big Three and there neighbouring peers. The hiatus caused by the tensions between Princeton and Harvard would further augment their growing fanbase and their status in America’s game. The apparent conflict between academic and athletic staff that was evident on the more ancient college campuses regarding the role of sport and the strategic purpose of college was not so prevalent elsewhere. Indeed, many emergent colleges seemed to embrace the dominance of the football programme on their campus seeing it as a great marketing tool and an attractive fundraising opportunity.

As those rival programs grew in size and stature, so too did their dominance in shaping the sport, expanding the gulf between their approach and that of the older schools who were so important in shaping the sport’s early existence, indeed, the formation of collegiate sports entirely. This growth would also bring in tidy sums of money to the respective colleges. Athletic directors were on a first name basis with some of the biggest donors and benefactors, were reaching out to the best emergent high school talent and enticing them to commit to their colleges. Outsizing their older rivals, they no longer wished to be bound by the strictures of the Big Three’s rules and regulations, which increasingly sought to limit precisely this sort of growth.

This coincides with the rise of the aforementioned NCAA, founded under its previous name: the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States. Formed in 1906 before changing to its present name in 1910, this association was instituted as a response to President Roosevelt’s calls for an end to the violence exhibited in collegiate football.

Prompted by Roosevelt and initially convened by Chancellor Henry MacCracken of New York University in 1905, a group of thirteen colleges met to agree a series of rule changes and a governing structure for their beloved sport. Those colleges were: Amherst; Army; Columbia; Dartmouth; Fordham; Lafayette College; Lehigh University; Stevens; Syracuse; Trinity; Union; and Wesleyan. Six other schools had been invited to attend: Cornell (did not feel the rules needed changing); Harvard (the administration at the time was anti-football entirely); Navy (subject to military travel restrictions); Princeton (satisfied with the existing rules structures and their potential for reform); Penn (aligned with the Big Four and the existing rules structures); and Yale (who, under Walter Camp, were opposed to reform. These were considered the twenty big football powerhouses at that time. Those fourteen schools that comprised the initial meeting inaugurated the IAAUS as a rule-setting and governing body for intercollegiate sport, particularly focussing on football and rowing – sports that had been the traditional preserve of the Big Three who may well have felt that they, alone, had the authority to dictate the governance of those respective sports and were not entirely happy to see other colleges parking their tanks on their lawn, so to speak. The IAAUS was formally established the following year with sixty-two schools sending delegates to attend the inaugural meeting and thirty-nine thereof choosing to become charter members endorsing the IAAUS code and participating in the intercollegiate athletics conferences under their banner. Harvard, Yale and Princeton would send delegates to these meetings but refrained from endorsing the new association, preferring, instead, to govern their game via the Football Rules Committee that had been established by Walter Camp. These schools (sometimes referred to as the “Roosevelt Group”, were keen to preserve and grow their sport and were concerned that many of the attendees of MacCracken’s meeting would rather see the sport destroyed, certainly MacCracken was not a fan of the brutal game (and NYU would eventually discontinue their football program in 1953)⁷⁷. Many of the other attending delegates expressed support for the organisation but lacked the authority to commit their respective schools without board approval, thus joining subsequently but not as charter members. The organisation had more than doubled to eighty members by 1912, having changed its name in 1910. The Roosevelt Group’s Football Rules Committee would participate in rule-setting alongside this new organisation through the American Intercollegiate Rules Committee, in which Walter Camp would have an outsized role in the formation of the sport we know today. The influence of the Big Three / Roosevelt Group, on shaping the sport would, eventually, ease their concerns and they would refrain from their position of opposition, paving the way for their formal accession to the NCAA.

The organisation would begin to agree a common codified set of rules applicable to all intercollegiate athletics, expanding significantly upon its early focus on football (and, to a lesser extent, rowing). Whilst the IAAUS was initially conceived as a governing body, it would also not be long before intercollegiate competition would take place under its auspices through regional conferences comprised of the association’s members. The IAAUS (now NCAA) divided its member schools into regional groupings based on geography (as transnational travel for sporting engagements was all but impossible for most colleges). These regions included: New England; the Mid-Atlantic; the South; the Mid-West; the Northwest; the Southwest; and the Pacific Coast.

The first official championship of the NCAA took place in 1921, a Track & Field meet at The University of Chicago. The association’s first basketball championship took place at Northwestern University in 1939. Following the 1921 meeting, a 10-point Code of Conduct was accepted by NCAA member schools which would prohibit true freshmen and postgraduate students from participation in varsity athletics. So too would any players attached to or having been contracted to professional sports. Restrictions on transfers were introduced alongside gambling bans. Faculty were awarded greater control, where students had often overseen sporting events before and athletes were limited to three years of participation at varsity-level. Formal conferences under the NCAA would also be introduced with member schools scheduling regular play and competition in NCAA sanctioned sports. The leadership of those schools that would later form the Ivy League (and their similarly minded peer schools such as those of the Patriot League) could support these early positions and would support the burgeoning association. Football, however, would largely continue outside of conference arrangements with the big schools preferring to schedule their own seasons based on revenue potential.

Despite this apparent strict code of conduct, the lucrative financial windfall that big football and basketball programs brought to schools across the country would see many campuses finding ways to work around these rules to attract the best talent and edge out an advantage over their competitors. In many conferences, particularly across the American south, these practices were widely engaged in. The awarding of athletic scholarships and inducements was commonplace and resulted in the NCAA’s Conference of Conferences in 1946 in which the so-called “Sanity Code” was introduced. This new set of rules would require all NCAA member schools to adhere to strict criteria regarding the offer of scholarships. The NCAA would require that any such financial support must be needs-based and that student athletes must be subject to the same academic and admissions criteria as other students. Such measures were strongly supported by the Presidents of the elite ancient private colleges of the Northeast and Midwest.

Measures had also been tabled that would sanction those schools that had abused the NCAA’s rules with a proposal to strip them of their NCAA membership. However, the motion did not achieve the two-thirds of votes required to pass. Whilst the Sanity Code was endorsed, a clear split in the views of NCAA members was evident – many schools supported their Southern counterparts and wished to see a greater push towards athletic scholarships and financial incentives for athletes that would help them grow their program and increase their financial clout through ticket sales and merchandise. The failure to pass this motion was seen in some quarters as a signal that the NCAA lacked the teeth required to enforce their rules and that some conferences would continue to exploit loopholes in the system or flagrantly breach existing rules. Bringing in the best athletes from across the country, the highest performing coaches and, more importantly, ticket paying fans, press coverage and merchandise sales would further result in increased donations as alumni and others would contribute significantly to the university’s funds. Their athletic dominance would boost school spirit and even help to attract non-athletic students as these schools would expand their reputation and use their increased wealth to develop their academic departments, recruit renowned faculty and invest in learning facilities. Those schools that shunned the elevation of student athletics faced the opposite trajectory, declining revenues, departing fans, decreased investment potential and the loss of cache in attracting the best and brightest. Only those with a modest and historic endowment could realistically survive.

For the old guard, who had long favoured academics over athleticism on campus, this was an ominous sign of the changing times. The status quo was shifting and many colleges were aligning their future with their athletic successes.

With the signing of the Ivy Group Agreement in 1945, the Ivy colleges set out to govern their big-ticket football programs and would set a framework that would govern Ivy athletics forever more.

The agreement (also known as the Ivy Presidents’ Agreement or Presidents’ Agreement) was a formal pact between the eight member institutions containing a series of covenants restricting participation in varsity athletics and the extension of financial support to students. It clearly influenced the NCAA’s Sanity Code. The agreement was built around the central tenet: to “preserve the amateur” and that players and coaches should be “permitted to enjoy the game as participants in a form of recreational competition rather than as professional performers in public spectacles.“⁶⁹

The Ivy Group schools were already members of the Eastern College Athletic Conference (ECAC) and would continue to participate in sports under the ECAC arrangements and rules, in addition to the new Ivy Group rules.

From the outset, only representatives of the eight member schools were invited to join this agreement. These were the eight schools that had established a serious academic pedigree, had regularly engaged one another in athletic competition and were similarly minded with regards to athletic scholarship, student financing and admissions standards. The Big Three could not go it alone and so sought to expand their tripartite relations to lock in peer schools and present a significant public face for opposition to the changing direction of college sports. The obvious place to start was the Eastern Intercollegiate Basketball League (EIBL), which had formed in 1901 and included founding schools: Columbia; Cornell; Harvard; Princeton; and Yale. Penn joined in 1903, Dartmouth in 1911 and Brown in 1953 (as a stepping stone to the Ivy League). Unlike football, basketball had become much more organised in conference style scheduling.

Intercollegiate athletic competition first commenced with rowing and various regattas, dominated by a handful of Northeastern colleges. However, by the turn of the 20^th Century, football had become the dominant sport and was the most financially lucrative. College games brought in thousands of ticket-paying spectators. The capacity to schedule exciting match ups was key to a program’s success. So it was that football dominated the discussion around organised sport.

However, colleges also fielded varsity teams in a host of other sports, particularly basketball, baseball, wrestling, gymnastics and others. Unlike football, these sports did not have afford the same revenue potential in the earlier part of the last century (of course this would change substantially, especially in the cases of basketball and baseball).

The Ivy schools and their peers competed against one another in a variety of different sports and conferences, mostly under the auspices of the Eastern College Athletic Conference (ECAC). Founded as the Central Office for Eastern Intercollegiate Athletics in 1938, the conference was the overarching administrative body, helping the various collegiate conferences within its region with scheduling and operations. The organisation was founded by James Lynah of Cornell (graduated from Cornell in 1905 and served as the college’s first Director of Athletics from 1935 to 1943) and Asa Bushnell (Princeton ’21), who served as the first commissioner of ECAC. The Eastern Association of Rowing Colleges would be founded under ECAC in 1938. Existing conferences such as the Eastern Intercollegiate Gymnastics League (EIGL) would affiliate with ECAC as did other organisations like the Eastern Intercollegiate Wrestling Association (EIWA) and several other sports arrangements which included the Ivy League colleges. ECAC would include many schools which were not part of the Ivy League, but which shared a sporting history and, in many cases, a rivalry with some of these schools. The Ivy League, however, would remain distinct and separate from ECAC.

The Ivy schools that would ultimately establish the Ivy League competed against one another in these various sports for decades prior to the establishment of that league. Most famously, they competed in the aforementioned EIBL which would later be absorbed by the Ivy League as the only major sporting conference which was limited to Ivy League schools and which had not affiliated with ECAC (albeit that the various schools could field basketball teams in ECAC affiliated arrangements).

The seven primary members of the EIBL also competed against one another in track & field through the Heptagonal Games. This seven-way competition, known as the “Heps” saw teams from Columbia; Cornell, Dartmouth; Harvard; Penn; Princeton; and Yale duke it out for athletic honours from 1934 until it was absorbed into the Ivy League in 1954 after Brown joined in 1949. Whilst the Heps would not be affiliated with ECAC, Ivy schools would also participate in ECAC track meets.

The Ivy League would launch formally as a football season round-robin conference in 1956, with following two years of preparation. Other sports would follow the year after.

This football conference and the two other all-Ivy sports conferences, the Heps and the EIBL, were the core pillars of the early architecture of the Ivy League once it expanded beyond its’ inaugural football purpose. It would, however, be remiss of us not to explore the various other conferences which shaped the intercollegiate competition between these schools and their peers.

Predecessor tournaments, leagues and conferences

The early half of the 21^st Century saw the emergence of organised collegiate sport, developing into the system familiar to most of us today. This steady state of coalescence was slow building at first but, arguably, began with the very first organised collegiate sporting event in 1852, The Harvard-Yale Regatta and gained momentum with the regular codification of collegiate football in the inter-war period. Of course, many other sports were contested, and many formal conferences were established long before football became so organised, with baseball, basketball, wrestling, sailing, rowing, squash, tennis and other sports leagues springing up across the country and defining the collegiate sports landscape. Many of the colleges that became the Ivy League participated in various of these conferences in the years prior to the establishment of the Ivy Group.

*_{(a concept poster for the Eastern Intercollegiate Cricket Association as imagined by AI)}*

Intercollegiate Cricket Association (ICA) / Eastern Intercollegiate Cricket Association (EICA) [1881]

The gentleman’s game, cricket has long been the preserve of the British Public Schools and ancient universities, a game once played, almost exclusively, by the upper classes. It has, of course, evolved and expanded since it was first played in Southern England in the Middle Ages, becoming a popular middle-class sport across the Commonwealth. The sport was once popular in North America too, having been introduced by British émigrés in the colonial era.

Indeed, cricket matches have been recorded across the original thirteen colonies, particularly in Virginia where many British aristocrats had settled, establishing plantations and seeking to create their own landed estates where they would not inherit the same at home (typically these were second sons and thus any estate or titles within their family would pass to their older brother).

The sport, often referred to as “elevens”, proved a popular pastime and was played across the Northeast too where the monied old WASP families, with their anglophile tendencies, engaged in the game for leisure. Matches were played throughout the mid-1700s in New York City, especially with the establishment of St. George’s Cricket Club in 1838 (who would later offer their facilities to Columbia to encourage the development of the sport in the nation’s elite colleges). However, the game became especially popular amongst the Philadelphia elite, the so-called “Mainliners”. At a college level, cricket was documented as being played at Dartmouth in at least 1793, at Yale in 1818, and at Fordham, Harvard, and Ohio Wesleyan University in the 1830s⁷⁹.

The game’s popularity on most campuses would experience spells of decline as other sports came to dominate college life. So it was at Yale which, when challenged to a cricket match in 1886 by Harvard (to be played in 1887), could not field a team to contest the game and was forced to decline⁸⁰. The following year, in 1888, The Freshman Club was established at the New Haven school to provide for recreational cricket (for amusement only and not for competition). Harvard issued a new challenge to The Freshman Club⁸¹.

However, the game was played most prolifically at Haverford College and the University of Pennsylvania who formed a fierce rivalry starting with their first contested innings in 1864, reckoned to be the third oldest rivalry in intercollegiate sport in the United States (following the Harvard-Yale Regatta first rowed in 1852 and the Amherst-Williams baseball contest which began in 1859). Haverford and Penn were the driving forces behind the formation of the Intercollegiate Cricket Association (ICA) in 1881, which would later be known as the Eastern Intercollegiate Cricket Association (ECA). Surprisingly, the development of cricket was relatively late to the Philadelphia colleges, with Haverford believed to have played the game since its foundation in 1833⁸² and Penn’s first game reckoned to have been played in 1842. Penn would even feature in an international series in 1895 when several games were played against a visiting team comprised of players from Oxford and Cambridge.

The two colleges were joined by founding members: Columbia; Harvard; and Princeton⁸³. Cornell was not one of the original member schools but joined as a charter member later⁸⁴. The association remained a loose collective until 1890 when Harvard, Haverford and Penn, as the major cricket programs, came together to determine a new code for their sport, later inviting Columbia to become a signatory to the same and setting out how the association would go forward⁸⁵. Playing for the Intercollegiate Cricket Cup⁸⁶, the championship was dominated by Penn who claimed twenty-three titles⁸⁷, followed by Haverford with nineteen. Harvard has six titles and Cornell has one. Some of these titles are shared championships.

The conference was disbanded in 1924 as the sport became increasingly less popular and baseball had overtaken it as America’s first bat-and-ball game. Cricket has never been sponsored by the NCAA and is not widely played at the collegiate level. The Ivy League does not sponsor a cricket conference, however there are sporadic matches between Ivy League colleges at a club or varsity team level, with increasing regularity in the past two decades as the game’s popularity begins to return. Harvard reestablished a cricket club in 2011, joining American College Cricket (ACC) that same year⁸⁸ and playing a tentative match against Yale the following year⁸⁹. The first Ivy League championship taking place at the direction of the ACC association in 2014, won by Penn (in which Cornell, Harvard, Penn and Princeton participated for the Colin M. Jodah Trophy – named in honour of the brother of the President of American College Cricket)⁹⁰.

The Ivy colleges with a current cricket program (Brown, Cornell, Harvard, Penn, and Yale) currently compete against various other schools under the National College Cricket Association (NCCA). Yale reached the semi-finals in 2019⁹¹. In the early years of cricket, many players from the Ivy League colleges made international appearances in the United States cricket team.

*_{(a concept poster for the Intercollegiate Fencing Association as imagined by AI)}*

Intercollegiate Fencing Association (ICFA / IFA) / Eastern Intercollegiate Fencing Association (EIFA) [1894]

Fencing was also a popular sport at the nation’s best schools, prized as a preparatory sport for prospective warriors in an age where soldiers still carried swords and may well have used them in battle. In fact, swords were still standard issue for many global powers until the advent of the First World War.

In 1894, Charles Fitzhugh Townsend of Columbia launched the Intercollegiate Fencing Association (IFA or ICFA) with its first competitive fixtures taking place that same year. It was the manifestation of a project which began in 1893 when he commissioned the Little Iron Man trophy to be awarded to the champion in the Men’s Foil competition, being first awarded in 1896.

Fitzhugh Townsend was a prolific swordsman who would later represent the United States at the St. Louis Olympics in 1904⁹². He invited competitors from Harvard and Yale to the Racquet and Tennis Club of New York for the inaugural competition⁹³ which he, himself, won in front of a most distinguished audience of Brahmin and Knickerbocker elites. He won again in 1896, becoming the first holder of the Little Iron Man, before going on to win honours representing the New York Fencers Club before his untimely death in 1906, succumbing to Typhoid Fever.

Whilst Fitzhugh Townsend was undoubtedly the finest individual fencer in the IFA’s early years, the Harvard team would take repeated championships for the first three years of the competition⁹⁴.

The organisation would gradually expand to include twelve core members: Army; The City College of New York (CCNY)⁹⁵; Columbia; Cornell; Hamilton College; Harvard; MIT; Navy; NYU; Penn; Princeton; and Yale⁹⁶ ⁹⁷. The IFA would affiliate with ECAC, acting as a fencing conference within that organisation. It would often come to be called the Eastern Intercollegiate Fencing Association (“Easterns” or EIFA), especially at Columbia.

Columbia, the first winner of the competition, would dominate the sport for much of the organisation’s history⁹⁸ ⁹⁹, displacing Harvard’s early rise. Cornell’s Dick Pew being a force to be reckoned with during the mid 1950s¹⁰⁰, and Navy would also emerge as a powerhouse fencing program.

Within the Intercollegiate Fencing Association, the Ivy League schools would (after the founding of the league) determine the Ivy champion from their overall performance against the others within the IFA / EIFA tournament¹⁰¹. Similarly, many of the schools competed within the IFA for separate honours. Army, Harvard, Navy, Princeton and Yale competed for many years as the Pentagonal Meets¹⁰² ¹⁰³ until 1954 when Army dropped their fencing program¹⁰⁴. Thereafter, the remaining four schools would compete in the Tetragonal Meets¹⁰⁵ ¹⁰⁶ ¹⁰⁷.

A similar organisation, also under the auspices of ECAC¹⁰⁸, was founded in 1939¹⁰⁹ ¹¹⁰, the Eastern Intercollegiate Fencing Conference (EIFC) (also sometimes referred to as the Eastern Intercollegiate Fencing Association) whose members included, at various times: Amherst; Boston College; Boston University; Bowdoin; Dartmouth; Fordham; Hofstra University; Lafayette; Lehigh; Long Island University (LIU); Middlebury; Newark College of Engineering (now the New Jersey Institute of Technology – NJIT); Norwich University; Panzer College of Physical Education and Hygiene (merged into Montclair State University in 1958); Rutgers; Seton Hall University; Syracuse; Temple; Wagner Memorial Lutheran College; William & Mary¹¹¹ (who also maintained a Triangular Meet with Cornell and Hofstra); University at Buffalo; University of Newark (Newark University) (merged into Rutgers in 1946); The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC)¹¹²; and University of Virginia (UVA)¹¹³ ¹¹⁴ ¹¹⁵. Candidates for admission included: Brown; Colgate; Rollins College; and Williams¹¹⁶. Seton Hall would take the crown at the first conference meet, hosted by Dartmouth, and would set a course of domination in the sport that would last for many years to come¹¹⁷, being the team to beat in the late 1930s and early 1940s, when the Cetrulo brothers dispatched all contenders and became national champions¹¹⁸.

The two conferences were sometimes confused for one another with the Intercollegiate Fencing Association’s meets were regularly referred to as the “Eastern Intercollegiates” or the Eastern Intercollegiate Fencing Association¹¹⁹ ¹²⁰ ¹²¹, thus adding to the confusion and making record tracking more complicated. Some schools have also been members of both conferences depending on the viability of their fencing program (Dartmouth, for example, was in the IFA before it dropped its fencing program, joining the EIFA some years later when it restarted its fencing team, Amherst and Rutgers have also been in both, and Middlebury was invited to join the IFA¹²²).

Nonetheless, efforts were made to bring the two together as a single ECAC conference and to better determine the Eastern champions and as part of a movement towards a national conference. Whilst IFA and EIFC competitors would participate in national competition under the NCAA, the two conferences remained separate. However, teams from both conferences would regularly schedule non-conference games against one another¹²³.

The Intercollegiate Fencing Association organisation would continue for more than a century with some hiccoughs along the way. Famously, in 1915, some member schools voted against the introduction of the three-year eligibility rule which had been accepted in collegiate basketball and hockey which would have resulted in Columbia and Penn being kicked out of the conference¹²⁴. Initially a men’s conference, the IFA would begin to accept women’s teams. The latter decision being taken when the Intercollegiate Women’s Fencing Association (IWFA) moved to become the National Intercollegiate Women’s Fencing Association (NIWFA).

The IWFA was founded in 1929¹²⁵ as a counterpart to the IFA by three female collegiate fencers: Julia Jones and Dorothy Hafner of NYU and Elizabeth Ross of Cornell, who were inspired by the IFA’s success in advancing the sport. The IWFA’s membership would overlap with the IFA, with participants coming from: Brooklyn College; Cornell; Elmira College; Fairleigh Dickinson University (FDU); Hofstra; Hunter College; New Jersey State Teachers College (Jersey City State Teachers College, now The College of New Jersey); NYU; Panzer; Paterson State College (now the William Paterson University of New Jersey); Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT); College of Saint Elizabeth (now Saint Elizabeth University – SEU); and Wagner¹²⁶.

The IWFA organisation became a national body in 1964 taking in member schools across the country over the years, in addition to its existing members, including: Army; Bryn Mawr; California State University, Fullerton; CCNY; Drew University; Haverford; James Madison University (JMU); Johns Hopkins; Marist College; Mt Holyoke; Navy; NJIT; Penn State; Princeton; Queens College; Rutgers; San José State University (SJSU); St. John’s University (SJU); Smith College; Stevens; Swarthmore College; Temple; Tufts; University of Florida; University of Maryland; UVA; Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech); William & Mary; Yale; and Yeshiva University¹²⁷.

Ultimately, the IFA disbanded in 2009. Its final season included representatives from: Brandeis University; Brown; Columbia; Cornell; Harvard; MIT; NYU; Penn; Princeton; Vassar College; and Yale, with the Elis taking home the final Little Iron Man trophy at Brandeis¹²⁸. During its long tenure, at various points, teams representing: Amherst¹²⁹; Brooklyn College¹³⁰; Dartmouth¹³¹ ¹³²; The Ohio State University¹³³ ¹³⁴; Penn State; Pitt¹³⁵; Rutgers¹³⁶; SJU¹³⁷ ¹³⁸, Trinity; and Wesleyan¹³⁹ ¹⁴⁰.

Today, fencing is an Ivy League sponsored varsity sport with seven of the schools participating. Dartmouth does not maintain a varsity fencing program but does occasionally send its nationally successful club fencing team¹⁴¹ to participate in the New England Intercollegiate Fencing Conference (NEIFC), where teams from across the region compete for “The Big One” (Fall Invitational tournament). NEIFC members include: Amherst; Boston College; Boston University; Brandeis; Brown; Dartmouth; MIT; Mt Holyoke; Sacred Heart University (SHU); Smith; Tufts; University of Connecticut (UConn); University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass); University of New Hampshire (UNH); University of Rhode Island (URI); University of Vermont; Vassar; Wellesley; Williams; and Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). Most of the NEIFC schools are also part of the Northeast Fencing Conference (NFC), alongside Bowdoin; Northeastern University; and Wheaton College.

*_{(a concept poster for the Eastern Intercollegiate Golf Association as imagined by AI)}*

Intercollegiate Golf Association (IGA) [1896] / Eastern Intercollegiate Golf Association (EIGA) [1924]

A sport that has been keeping the well-heeled gentlemen at leisure for centuries, golf first developed as a variant of existing stick and ball games on Scotland’s East coast over five hundred years ago. For much of that history, the sport was exclusively played by men but, today, the sport is as popular with women.

The game was similarly popular amongst the old-monied upper crust of American society, the families who traced their lineage back to the early settlers, arriving on the Mayflower, and the heirs to the great industrial fortunes and landed estates and plantations of the South.

Legend has it that the game owes its popularity in America to John Reid, a Scotsman who had emigrated to Yonkers and, in 1888, had set out a makeshift course in a pasture by his home where he would play and invite friends to take part¹⁴². This is unlikely to be the full story given how quickly the sport would be adopted by the American elite. They would open golf and country clubs in the genteel neighbourhoods in which they resided in their grand Gilded Age mansions. The embrace of British sensibilities and heritage was a curious phenomenon of the Gilded Age as the upper echelons of American society sought to establish their lineage and legitimacy as a new nobility, an aristocratic class with a divine right to govern the burgeoning Republic. A cultural marvel in stark contrast to the founding fathers’ ideology that had given the nation independence only a century beforehand. The practice of marrying great American fortunes into British aristocratic dynasties during this period is well documented. The embrace of the right sports and social pursuits was an important step towards demonstrating social grace and becoming acceptable or “clubbable” to their established British and European peers (if the American entrants were ever considered acceptable).

Golf’s surging popularity in America took place in the 1880s and 1890s. It was the time when golf courses were being established across the country, including: The Country Club, Brookline, Massachusetts, opened in 1882; The Saint Andrew’s Golf Club, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York in 1888; Shinnecock Hills Golf Club, Long Island, New York in 1891; Chicago Golf Club, Wheaton, Illinois in 1892 (original site is now the Belmont Golf Club); and Newport Country Club of Newport, Rhode Island in 1893. These five clubs would found the United States Golf Association (USGA) which would launch the first national championships. The USGA would expand rapidly having 25 member clubs by 1896¹⁴³.

So too, the sport would take root at the elite preparatory schools (the Group of Seven and St. Grottlesex schools) and colleges at which these young men would be educated¹⁴⁴ ¹⁴⁵. On the campuses of Harvard, Yale and Princeton, young men could regularly be seen knocking a ball about and the first movement towards a collegiate golf system was beginning to take shape. The game was first recorded in New Haven in 1896, where seniors were playing with hockey sticks and tennis balls. Yale’s Golf Club, founded in 1896, would be the first college club to field a team for a contest against The Saint Andrew’s Golf Club that same year. Also in 1896, the Yale club’s secretary would write to his counterparts at Columbia, Harvard, Penn and Princeton inviting them to participate in the first intercollegiate golf series. Harvard and Penn could not field a suitable team to participate, and Princeton declined due to preparations for a football match against Harvard. Thus, the first intercollegiate golf contest was between Columbia and Yale.

Despite the poor showing from Harvard, Penn, and Princeton, their respective golf societies were most keen to move forward on plans for a golf league. In 1897 the Intercollegiate Golf Association (IGA) was founded in which these five schools would be the founding members and Princeton would claim victory in the first championship¹⁴⁶. Penn, however, would not actually field a team in the contest until 1901. The participating colleges would compete in team and individual formats, with the Ardsley Cup being awarded to the overall championship team. In the early years, that team was Yale who won consistently until Harvard’s All-star team of 1904, which included Olympian Chandler Egan.

The IGA was, in theory, open to any college who could field an appropriate team that played to the IGA rulebook and had been voted in by a two-thirds majority of existing members. Cornell joined in 1903 but didn’t field a team until 1906.

The IGA’s founding minds had conceived taking the organisation national. However other associations, particularly in the Midwest, had already gained a foothold in those respective regions. Similarly, the New England Intercollegiate Golf Association (NEIGA), had been established in 1903 and saw golfers (so-called “divotmen”, “linksmen” or “linksters”) from: Amherst; Bowdoin; Brown; Dartmouth; MIT; and Williams. NEIGA was short-lived playing its last tournament in 1907 and dissolving in 1908. Its membership was invited to apply to join the IGA. Dartmouth and Williams accepted that offer and joined the IGA in 1908. Syracuse had applied to join in 1907 but never became a member. It is unclear as to whether their application was rejected or whether they withdrew. Cornell was not responsible for Syracuse not taking part as Big Red did not play their first collegiate golf competition until 1910¹⁴⁷, basketball, as we shall see later, was a different story.

The IGA enjoyed a close relationship with the United States Golf Association and boasted that their organisation’s champion would have a legitimate claim to being national champion, as sanctioned by the USGA. The burgeoning golf powerhouses of the West were greatly aggrieved at their programs and competition being overlooked, despite the accumulation of trophies and honours they were collecting. Schools including Chicago; Northwestern; and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (Wisconsin), founded the Western Intercollegiate Golf Association (WIGA). University of Michigan (Michigan) and University of Minnesota, Twin Cities were invited to join too, and the move was subject to national attention owing to the rise of Northwestern’s superstar golfer: Chick Evans. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Illinois) would also join the association with Stanford expressing support. Illinois would next make a play to participate in the IGA too and contend for the national championship title¹⁴⁸.

In 1916 the IGA expanded to include its first midwestern member: the University of Illinois. They were knocked out early in the competition by Cornell. The Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) would successfully apply to be included in the tournament in 1918 but would be precluded from competition for one year. Their nationally successful golf team, featuring the prodigy Bobby Jones, would not be maintained going into 1920 and they were dropped from the IGA for failure to pay dues. The association would expand its membership to include Berkeley; Tulane University; and the University of Washington, with individual representation from players at schools such as: Amherst; Army; Brown; Colgate; Lehigh; Minnesota; and Stanford. By the mid-1920s Georgia Tech were also back in the IGA. The IGA’s national expansion would bring about great changes to the setup with various regional conferences being established to send teams to the IGA national championship and ushering in the age of conference golf.

The Southwest Conference (SWC) came into being in 1914 with eight original members, bringing together: Baylor University; Southwestern University; Texas A&M University; Texas Christian University (TCU); University of Arkansas at Little Rock; The University of Oklahoma (OU); The University of Texas at Austin; and William M. Rice Institute for the Advancement of Literature, Science and Art (now Rice University). Not all these schools would field golf programs in the early stages of the conference – with the major schools being Rice, TCU, Texas, and Texas A&M.

The Pacific Coast Conference (PCC), which existed from 1915 until 1959 would have a big impact on collegiate golf. It’s founding members included: Berkeley; Oregon; Oregon Agricultural College (now Oregon State University); and Washington (who founded the league) and were the major golf programs. Other PCC members would include Stanford (whose alumni includes Tiger Woods); University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA); University of Idaho; University of Montana; University of Southern California (USC); Washington State University and would expand to include other West Coast colleges.

The Southern Intercollegiate Conference (SIC) was founded in 1921 and would be another golf power conference. The SIC was created by charter members: Georgia Tech; The University of Alabama; University of Georgia; University of the South (Sewanee); The University of Tennessee Knoxville (Tennessee); and Tulane. The conference was conceived to govern a multitude of sports and was the forerunner to the Southern Conference (SoCon), which stands today. The SIC would quickly expand to fourteen members to also include: Alabama Polytechnic Institute (now Auburn University); Clemson University; Maryland; Mississippi Agricultural & Mechanical College (now Mississippi State University for Agriculture and Applied Science); North Carolina State University; UNC; University of Kentucky; UVA; Virginia Tech; and Washington and Lee University (W&L)¹⁴⁹.

In a return to the IGA’s founding heritage, beginning in 1923 and coming to fruition in 1924¹⁵⁰, eight Northeastern colleges would establish a conference of their own: the Intercollegiate Golf League (IGL), later known as the Eastern Intercollegiate Golf League (EIGL). This conference would serve as their preliminary competition to take place in advance of the established IGA National Championships. Those eight schools included: Columbia; Cornell; Dartmouth; Harvard; Penn; Princeton; Williams; and Yale¹⁵¹ (Cornell was not a part of the initial conversations). The inaugural competition took place at the nation’s fourth oldest golf club, Greenwich Country Club, that summer. In recognition of the increasing profile of the sport, Yale began issuing letters to golfers winning in national championships.

The USGA took over the IGA officially in 1930. In 1931, the IGL would reconstitute as the Eastern Intercollegiate Golf Association (EIGA) with an expanded membership including: Brown; Dartmouth; Georgetown University¹⁵²; Harvard; Holy Cross¹⁵³; Penn; Princeton; Williams; and Yale¹⁵⁴ ¹⁵⁵. Yale would dominate the EIGA’s early years, taking every championship from 1931 to 1938, taking home the championship’s Maxwell Cup. Army, Columbia, Cornell and Navy would join the EIGA, followed thereafter by Penn State¹⁵⁶ ¹⁵⁷.

The core membership of was established. Of course, it is worth bearing in mind that these contests often required qualification so not all members made it to the championships as documented in the records. Furthermore, other schools would be represented by a team or individual entry on an invitational basis.

The league would be structured around a Northern and Southern conference with participating schools playing the others in their conference in the championship tournament. The 1938 competition had Brown; Dartmouth; Harvard; Holy Cross; Williams; and Yale in the Northern Conference with the Southern Conference made up of Cornell; Georgetown; Penn; Penn State; and Pitt¹⁵⁸. The 1941 tournament, for example, saw Dartmouth; Harvard; and Yale playing in the Northern Conference and Georgetown; Penn State; and Princeton making up the Southern Conference¹⁵⁹. These sub-division conferences would later be referred to as District I and District II¹⁶⁰. The EIGA would affiliate with the Eastern Collage Athletic Conference (ECAC) and under the framework set out by the NCAA.

Over the years, many other schools would join the core members at EIGA meets. University of Delaware¹⁶¹ ¹⁶² was a regular on the EIGA circuit, as was Temple¹⁶³. Other schools who had varying degrees of success at the eastern championships include Boston College¹⁶⁴ ¹⁶⁵ ¹⁶⁶; Colgate¹⁶⁷; Lehigh; Indiana University¹⁶⁸; Lafayette¹⁶⁹; MIT¹⁷⁰; Mt Holyoke¹⁷¹; Pitt¹⁷²; Rutgers¹⁷³; SJU¹⁷⁴ ¹⁷⁵; Syracuse¹⁷⁶; UVA¹⁷⁷; Villanova¹⁷⁸; and West Chester University (WCU)¹⁷⁹ ¹⁸⁰ (although their participation may have been limited to a women’s contest). Interestingly, and especially in the individual championships, entrants from some of the region’s preparatory schools also participated on an ad hoc basis (Hal Kuntz of The Lawrenceville School recorded a win in 1956¹⁸¹), as did teams composed of alumnus of the member schools¹⁸².

Until 1975, the Ivy League champion would be determined from performance in the EIGA regular season for whichever colleges were participating in a particular season. After 1975, the decision was made to maintain a distinct Ivy League championship in addition to the EIGA regular season¹⁸³. It is worth noting that the various member schools would also participate in other regional contests, invitationals and tournaments, some of which they would host themselves. Even today, many of the schools that once participated in the EIGA still regularly come up against one another at such events, the Metropolis Intercollegiate being a great example.

There is some evidence to suggest that a women’s counterpart organisation also existed, but records are limited and sporadic. The Women’s Eastern Intercollegiate Golf tournament is understood to have been established in 1966 and continued for some years¹⁸⁴. Certainly, there are reports that eleven teams took part in the 1969 meet, hosted by the University of Vermont. Cornell; State University of New York, Cortland (SUNY Cortland); Penn State; Skidmore College; and Vassar participated in that competition¹⁸⁵. It is possible that it is this competition in which Mt Holyoke and WCU had participated.

The EIGA would slowly start to lose its sheen as the East Coast’s premier golf tournament. When the Ivy League decided to officially sponsor golf in 1975 it marked the conference’s death knell, albeit that the EIGA would continue with other colleges until the 1990s. When big players who remained transitioned to golf within their primary conferences such as the Atlantic 10 or Big Ten, the EIGA would fizzle out. Throughout its long tenure, it had seen a number of famous golfers and coaches making their presence felt on the fairway, including: Jess Sweetser (Yale ’23) who won the Grand Slam in 1930, taking the British Amateur Championships, British Open, US Amateur Championships and US Open)¹⁸⁶; the revered business and management guru, Prof. Michael E. Porter of Harvard, who won the EIGL in 1968; Olympic rower Delos “Dutch” Schoch of the “Boys in the Boat” fame who would coach Princeton’s golf team after a spell as rowing coach¹⁸⁷; and fencing champion Al Decicco who coached the Rutgers Newark Scarlet Raiders fencing team before taking over the golf program, where it is reported that a John Rockefeller III was on his team in the early 1960s¹⁸⁸ (not the famous John D. Rockefeller III who would have been 56 years old at that time and was already a Princeton graduate).

If you wish to learn more about the fascinating evolution of collegiate golf in the United States then we highly recommend David Tenneson’s in-depth series: 5 Count 4: College Golf History. His work has been essential in our research on how this sport has shaped the Ivy League’s early history.

*_{(a concept poster for the Eastern Intercollegiate Basketball League as imagined by AI)}*

Eastern Intercollegiate Basketball League (EIBL) [1901]

As mentioned previously, the EIBL started in 1901 with five founding schools: Columbia; Cornell; Harvard; Princeton; and Yale. Penn joined in 1903, Dartmouth in 1911 and Brown in 1953. It would be the conference that would set the foundation for the Ivy League. The league was commonly referred to as the “Eastern Intercollegiate Fives”¹⁸⁹, not a reference to the five founding schools, rather a reference to the fact that the league operated a five-a-side basketball format. Indeed, early 20^th Century media commonly referred to sports by the number of participants per team, thus: basketball became known as fives; hockey as sixes; baseball as nines and so on. This may have emanated from the common practice, which still remains today, for traditional British Public School sports, where rugby is often known as XVs (fifteens) or VIIs (sevens), rowing as VIIIs (eights in sweep style) / IVs (fours in sweep style), pairs or singles, doubles, quadruples (in sculling style) and, to a lesser extent, association soccer can be known as elevens or eleven-a-side.

Basketball was first played in the United States in 1891 in Springfield, Massachusetts, having been conceptualised by gym teacher, James Naismith. The game took a seven to nine-a-side format. The first recorded intercollegiate basketball game took place in 1895 between Hamline University and the Minnesota State School of Agriculture (Minnesota A&M – now part of the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (Minnesota), Saint Paul campus). The following year, in 1896, a five-a-side variant took place between The University of Chicago and The University of Iowa. The sport was growing quickly and had spread across the Northeast and Midwest and was becoming a common pursuit on college campuses. In 1897, Yale met Penn, winning by 32-10, marking the first game involving Ivy League colleges and setting in motion the formation of the Eastern Intercollegiate Basketball League.

In 1901, the Eastern Intercollegiate Basketball League became the nation’s first basketball conference, a lineage which the Ivy League claims due to its later absorption into that conference. The EIBL was the first to introduce the double round-robin format that has since become ubiquitous in American sport. Yale was its inaugural champion. Championship games would often take place on neutral territory as part of big basketball nights. The old Boston Garden arena was a regular host, as were other college stadia, including Rutgers¹⁹⁰. However, despite repeated efforts, the EIBL and early Ivy League would not be drawn to major meets at the likes of Madison Square Garden (MSG)¹⁹¹. Harvard would represent New England at the MSG NCAA sanctioned play-offs in 1946, but Ivy appearances would become spotty in the years after that. Since those early years, the Ivy League has become famous for not having a championship playoff with the champion instead being chosen through regular-season competition. The championship playoffs have returned to Ivy League basketball, and, from 2028, “Ivy Madness” championship games will take place at a neutral venue once again with a contract awarded to the PPL Center in Allentown, Pennsylvania¹⁹².

Syracuse, having played many scheduled games against EIBL schools, is believed to have begun discussions to join the EIBL in 1908, taking it more seriously in 1912. Syracuse’s board launched exploratory discussions to join the conference but sought Cornell’s support before making a formal application. Cornell’s faculty voted against supporting ‘Cuse due to the college’s long-standing rivalry (and allegations of poor sportsmanship), particularly in the sport of football, and concerns about their relative geographic proximity and impact on market potential¹⁹³. So ended the proposal. Nonetheless, some reporters have used this history to suggest that Syracuse was affiliated with the EIBL¹⁹⁴. Similarly, other erroneous suggestions have been made in respect of other schools too. It has been suggested that Bucknell University was a member of the EIBL for the 1941-42 season¹⁹⁵ but this is not the case, albeit Bucknell did play some fixtures in that season, in non-conference scheduling, with members of the EIBL. Such reports often fuel speculation that these colleges could or should have been admitted into the Ivy League.

A similarly named Eastern Intercollegiate Conference (EIC) existed between 1932 and 1939 which included Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University); Georgetown; Pitt; Temple; and West Virginia University (WVU). Bucknell participated in this conference in 1933 for one season which may result in some of the confusion about their affiliation with the EIBL. Penn State joined in 1935. Another conference bearing a similar name was the Eastern Collegiate Basketball League, founded in 1975 and which would later become the Atlantic 10¹⁹⁶, with founding members including: Duquesne University; The George Washington University (GWU); Penn State; Pitt; Rutgers; UMass; Villanova; and WVU.

Before being locked down as the Ivy League, the EIBL saw its membership vary between five and eight members over the seasons. Competition was suspended from 1908 to 1910 and again in the 1918-19 season. Harvard withdrew from competition for one year in 1904-05; for twenty-four years in 1907-08 until 1932-33; and for two years from 1943-46. Yale withdrew from the 1912-13 season and for two years from 1943-46. Princeton also withdrew for the 1944-45 season. All the schools came together again following the Ivy Group Agreement.

In the early decades, the teams represented the best of East Coast basketball and would regularly be contenders for national championship discussions and would often play the winner of the Western Conference in a three-series “National Championship” contest. The Western Conference being the forerunner to the Big Ten and had been formed by: Chicago; Illinois; Minnesota; Northwestern; Purdue University; University of Michigan (Michigan); and Wisconsin, with Indiana and Iowa joining shortly thereafter followed by Ohio State. When the National Invitation Tournament began in 1938, national champions would be determined in a showcase game and EIBL / Ivy League champions would be invited to attend but would occasionally decline seeing other Eastern colleges being invited to take their place. The Eastern Intercollegiate Basketball League would cede in 1954 having been absorbed into the Ivy League that would claim its lineage in basketball.

In 1970, the Ivy Group would solidify a precedent established when Dartmouth declined participation in the Rose Bowl in 1937, issuing a moratorium on NIT and championship games¹⁹⁷ ¹⁹⁸ thus preventing Columbia for availing of an NIT ticket¹⁹⁹. However, that position would soften later that same year with the decision being overturned allowing schools to make a choice as to whether to attend but strongly indicating that a careful path should be chosen²⁰⁰ ²⁰¹. Nonetheless, a stance against playoff games was forming within the Ivy League administration that would come to define Ivy League sports in the decades to follow.

Basketball is still a major sport on Ivy League campuses, with the colleges competing at Division I standard under the NCAA and many Ivy graduates featuring in the National Basketball Association (NBA) and other major basketball leagues. Princeton has the historic legacy as the dominant force in the League.

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Eastern Intercollegiate Debate League (EIDL) [1911 / 1923]

Debate is a core part of the traditional college experience and taken seriously as a representation of an institution’s academic prowess, with students demonstrating a mastery of rhetoric and discourse. Often known as “Forensics”, it has always been a celebrated, competitive program at the Ivies and their peers. Since antiquity, the most learned institutions encouraged their young scholars to pursue the art of debate and rhetoric – preparing them for future leadership in the halls and debating chambers of the great democracies.

Harvard, Yale and Princeton had a triangular debate going back earlier than 1911 – with the first such debate involving freshman taking place that year²⁰². Debating had become a core part of the American university experience, often against visiting teams, including Oxford and Cambridge. An Eastern Intercollegiate Debate League was founded in 1923²⁰³ under the University Debating Association²⁰⁴ bringing together nine founding colleges including: Amherst; Bates College²⁰⁵ ²⁰⁶; Brown; Dartmouth; Harvard; Penn²⁰⁷; Wesleyan²⁰⁸; Williams; and Yale. Cornell, whilst being involved in the founding of the league would never take part, with Harvard having been invited to take their place in the charter discussions²⁰⁹. The first debate under the EIDL header took place in 1924 with a triangular debate between Harvard, Brown and Amherst and absorbed the triangular debate association between Harvard, Yale and Princeton, albeit that Princeton did not formally join the EIDL at its commencement²¹⁰. Princeton would later join the EIDL, being recognised as a member by 1930, alongside Penn, when Vassar joined²¹¹. Columbia²¹² and Smith²¹³ would both participate in the conference through the 1920s and 1930s before departing. At some point in the early 1930s, Amherst, Brown, Dartmouth, Harvard, Penn, Princeton and Yale would depart with Colgate and Mount Holyoke having joined. Williams vacated the league in 1936 with MIT taking their place²¹⁴ and an agreement for Brown to rejoin having been reached²¹⁵. The EIDL membership would later include: Bates (sometimes referred to in news articles as “Maine”); Bowdoin; Bucknell; Connecticut College; Gettysburg College; Lafayette; Pembroke (Brown); Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI); Rutgers²¹⁶; Smith; and Trinity.

Within the EIDL, Amherst, Wesleyan and Williams maintained their own “Little Three” contest²¹⁷. Over the years of the conference, Bates would gain a reputation as a debate powerhouse school and was often the one to beat. By 1939, none of the schools that would later comprise the Ivy League remained in this league, however the EIDL would continue for many more years.

Since 1946, an Ivy Debate Conference existed with Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Penn and Princeton. Dartmouth and Yale had refused to join as Dartmouth felt the quality of the debating was “inferior” and Yale did not like the format. They eventually joined when Harvard threatened to withdraw unless they joined and consolidated a new Ivy League Debate Conference. This new conference launched officially in 1955²¹⁸ – thus the Ivy League was always more than a sports conference.

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Eastern Intercollegiate Baseball League (EIBL) / The Quadrangle Cup [1925 / 1929]

Football may be the most watched sport on college campuses, basketball might be the most profitable, but it is baseball that has come to be known as America’s “national pastime”²¹⁹ and unofficial national sport. Having first been played in Hoboken in 1846, baseball’s early New York fanbase had rapidly expanded across the Northeast and was a firm fixture on the campuses of America’s old and most prestigious colleges.

The American College Baseball Association (ACBA) began in 1880, when six schools met in Springfield, Massachusetts to agree a conference arrangement and a commitment to keeping professional players out of their varsity teams. Those six schools included: Amherst, Brown, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton and Yale. Yale did not compete in the inaugural season as they had a very strong team and preferred to schedule their own games²²⁰ ²²¹.

Harvard, Princeton and Yale withdrew from this conference in 1887 to participate as a Big Three in baseball, organising regular games against one another but otherwise arranging their own schedule thereafter. The remaining ACBA teams continued to compete under this banner until 1899 when the conference formally ceased.

Columbia launched the Quadrangle Cup in 1925 which saw teams from Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth and Penn compete for the annual trophy²²². This competition would lay the foundation stones for the Eastern Intercollegiate Baseball League (EIBL).

In 1929, a coalition of colleges founded the (EIBL), with its members including: Columbia; Cornell; Dartmouth; Penn; Princeton; and Yale. The association’s first games commenced in 1930 with Dartmouth taking the championship title²²³. Harvard joined in 1932 with a brief hiatus from 1942 – 1946. The conference further expanded to include Army, Brown and Navy in 1947 after the signing of the Ivy Group Agreement. The conference was split into two further subdivisions, the North and South Conferences. The four colleges of the Quadrangle Cup continued to compete for that trophy within the EIBL.

Also in 1929, a rival league was proposed by the baseball coach and athletics director of Fordham University, Jack Coffey. Concerned by the threat of dominance of the EIBL and hoping to ensure that his program and that of a select group of other schools remained on a par with the EIBL schools. This league was primarily based around an elite Jesuit schools league that had also been founded in 1925, bringing together: Boston College; Fordham; Georgetown; and Holy Cross – Catholic schools often considered to be on a par with the Ivies. Coffey invited Brown; Colgate; Lafayette; Lehigh; NYU; Rutgers; and Syracuse to join this arrangement with Georgetown having failed to indicate whether they would join. Coffey’s plan took a step further in 1931 when thirteen schools indicated their acceptance of an invitation to attend. These schools included: Army; Boston College; Brown; Colgate; Fordham; Georgetown; Holy Cross; Lafayette; NYU; Penn State; Rutgers; Syracuse; and Villanova. Ambitiously, the group hoped that they could bring in Harvard to increase the conference to fourteen members, recognising that Harvard had not joined the EIBL at that time²²⁴. Bizarrely, the league proposed by Coffey contemplated calling itself the Eastern Intercollegiate Baseball Conference or, potentially, the Eastern Intercollegiate Baseball League. Clearly this would have proven to be very confusing. Coffey even proposed that the two conferences should compete in a playoff series to crown an Eastern Intercollegiate champion. Clearly, there was some hope that the two leagues would be considered the same and, perhaps, would ultimately merge into a single league of elite Northeastern schools.

Certainly, and curiously, the schools Coffey invited to join are the very same schools that had regularly played and would continue to play the Ivy League schools in non-conference games. So too are they the most often touted schools that may have been considered or should be considered as candidates for admission to the Ivy League. Of course, Brown and Harvard did, in fact, join the Eastern Intercollegiate Baseball League in 1932 and 1947 respectively and the Ivy League thereafter.

The league was recognised as a Division I conference when the NCAA introduced divisions in 1973 and continues to be a Division I series of programs as the Ivy League.

The EIBL organised regular schedules, under the general administration of ECAC, until 1991 when the decision was made to disband the conference with the Ivy sponsoring varsity baseball from 1992 onwards. The decision followed that of their counterpart Patriot League which had launched baseball that year. As such, Army and Navy left to participate in their primary league leaving only the Ivy League colleges, which, since 1956, had declared the best placed team amongst themselves to be the Ivy League champion. Thus, it no longer made sense to continue the EIBL when its effective champion would be the Ivy League champion anyway.

Over the years of the EIBL, Harvard came to dominate taking fifteen championships (in some years the championship was shared between more than one school) and an Ivy League championship (if the championship winner was one of the service academies, then an Ivy League champion would be separately crowned). Dartmouth claimed ten championships and three additional Ivy League crowns, Princeton claimed nine conference titles and one Ivy crown, Yale have eight EIBL championships equalling Navy’s record. Penn and Columbia both took eight EIBL championships each with Columbia also winning three Ivy League titles. Cornell has five championships to its name and three Ivy League titles. Army has four EIBL championships and Brown has just one and a shared Ivy League title too.

Since the conference transitioned into the Ivy League, Princeton have been the dominant force, claiming eight titles. Many Ivy League players have featured in major league and minor league baseball.

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Eastern Intercollegiate Badminton Championships / Eastern Intercollegiate Badminton Association [1939]

Beginning in 1939, the Eastern Intercollegiate Badminton Championships were formed as an individual collegiate knock-out contest for the region’s best badminton players. Athletes representing a host of schools, primarily based in or near New York City and, later, Philadelphia, took part to determine a regional champion. Competition took place in singles and doubles format for men and women. The individuals represented their college but were competing for themselves and, in some cases, formed doubles partnerships with competitors from rival colleges. The first championship, which saw representatives from twelve schools in attendance, took place at the Old Sixty-Ninth Badminton Club at the 165^th Regiment Armory (formerly home to the 69^th New York Infantry Regiment for which the badminton club borrows its name). Columbia beat Yale for the singles title, with Princeton also in attendance²²⁵. The championship continued in this format through the 1940s with attendees from: Brooklyn College; Brooklyn Collegiate and Polytechnic Institute (Brooklyn Poly) (since merged into NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering); CCNY; Colgate; Cornell; Hobart College; Manhattan College; Lehigh; Penn; Temple; and, in the women’s championship: Bryn Mawr; Finch College; Maryland State Teachers’ College (now Towson University); and Wheaton²²⁶ ²²⁷ ²²⁸.

The singles contest was won by Penn in 1940, when Robert Emrey Booth beat out his opponents to claim the title. Booth was the co-captain of the Penn varsity squash team alongside the noted social commentator, E. Digby Baltzell.

In 1941, these championships were used as the basis for the formation of a proper Eastern Intercollegiate Badminton Association (EIBA), moving to a regularly scheduled, round-robin competition bringing together varsity teams from Columbia, Lehigh, Penn, Princeton, Williams, and Yale. Yale also played an exhibition game against Navy as part of the first EIBA season. The association explored plans to play an all-star end of season game against a similar team comprised of the greatest players from a conference in the south²²⁹.

The association fizzled out, likely as other collegiate conferences absorbed their respective members’ varsity badminton competition. The Ivy League schools discontinued competition in the association with the launch of the Ivy League, however the Ivy League itself did not actually extend to varsity badminton competition until 2013²³⁰ when the first competition between the Ivies took place. The first official Ivy League-sanctioned event took place the following year²³¹. A league of the same name, the Eastern Intercollegiate Badminton Association was documented in the 1970s with some overlap in participation with schools that had taken part in the championships of the 1930s and 1940s but was not the same organisation. Today, the name lives on under the umbrella of the National Badminton Championships with various colleges from across the Eastern Seaboard participating in the Eastern Collegiate Team Badminton Championships which allows participants at club level, including from the Ivies. These championships are sponsored by the shuttlecock brand, Durabird, who even make an official DB40 shuttlecock for the tournament.

Records from the championships are limited however it would appear that Columbia, Penn, Princeton, and Yale were the big four dominant programs.

The Ivy League athletics conference was founded in 1954 as a means of consolidating informal sporting arrangements between a select group of universities that considered themselves to be peers at that time. These schools had regularly played against one another in a host of sports, particularly football, rowing, basketball etc. They were the schools that helped develop and codify American football amongst other sports. They participated in the Eastern Intercollegiate Basketball League (EIBL) (since absorbed into the Ivy League) and many of the member schools competed in the Eastern Intercollegiate Wrestling Association and the Intercollegiate Rowing Association. Additionally, many of the schools have a football rivalry with one or another that existed long before the creation of the NCAA. With the advent of televised sports fixtures and the proposals of the NCAA in the early 1950s to develop college football television markets on a league and conference basis, the Ivy League colleges saw the need to establish a formalised conference to protect their markets and to operate within the NCAA structure. Whilst the colleges had long-played each other and a number of other select institutions, it made sense to formalise a full sports conference around the long-established EIBL in which the same eight schools participated. The EIBL only added Brown in the years leading to the establishment of the Ivy League (and, at that stage, it was done so with the expressed purpose of establishing the Ivy League).

The schools that today comprise the Ivy League, have long considered one another to be peers athletically and academically. They have competed against one another and sometime peers (historically including schools like: Army; Bucknell; Colgate; Navy; McGill; Rutgers; Stanford; Syracuse; Toronto; and Tufts, particularly) both in various varsity sporting fixtures and in terms of admissions of the best and brightest minds from across North America. Today, many Ivy League conferences still maintain rivalries and occasional athletics fixtures with those one-time peer schools, especially those competing in the similarly regulated Patriot League. Thus, whilst, the Ivy League is, ostensibly, an athletic conference, it has always been a byword for exclusivity. That remains clear from the outset, the athletic directors and executive leadership of the member institutions set out firm criteria and commitments for academic rigour and exclusivity in order to preserve the reputation and standing of each school.

Such criteria includes strict standards for admissions and academic performance of student athletes. Moreover, it is best known as one of a select-few Division I NCAA conferences that prohibit financial scholarships and support for student athletes with Ivy League members prohibited from availing of the scholarship allowances set by the NCAA.

Notwithstanding that the Ivy League is, fundamentally, an athletics conference, the term “Ivy League” has been in use at least as far back as the 1930s as a description for an exclusive tier of Northeastern schools in the United States. Many of the Ivy League schools were established prior to the United States becoming and independent country (the so-called “Colonial Colleges”). The exact origin of the term remains unclear and has been subject to wide speculation with theories ranging from the common tradition of planting ivy on the campuses of ancient schools and colleges on the East Coast (often known as “Ivy Day” and many of the campuses are heavily decorated with ivy), to the application of Roman numerals to a mythical previous athletics conference comprised of the Big Three: Harvard; Princeton; and Yale and another unidentified school (It is worth noting that, historically, these three schools were collectively referred to as the Big Four alongside Union College – considered to be the preferred destinations for higher learning for the sons of America’s wealthy Protestant elite). The schools also share a close relationship with the so-called Seven Sisters schools (a group of historic women’s colleges that served as a counterpart to the historically male-only Ivy League). The term “Ivy League” has also come to be applied to a fashion subculture that celebrates the typical campus attire of the elite Northeastern colleges during the 1930s to 1960s.

The ambiguity of the term’s origins has contributed to the prestige afforded to the member schools and other schools that seek to be associated therewith. Various authors have ascribed terms such as Little Ivies; Hidden Ivies; Public Ivies; Jesuit/Catholic Ivies, Public Ivies and Black Ivies to a host of other institutions around the United States that hold a similar prestigious reputation but that may exist to serve those that were not the typical Ivy League candidate pre-1950s.

Indeed, communities at a number of Northeastern universities have approached the idea of a hypothesised Ivy League expansion with great fervour in order to boost the perception of their own alma mater as a peer school. It has long been rumoured that other colleges were invited for entry during the initial development of the league, albeit little proof has ever been afforded to back up those claims. It is often raised as a rumour only by those who attended the college to which the rumour they raise refers. Prior to the creation of the Ivy League, a sports journalist argued in 1936 that such a league should be established and, in order to combat accusations of elitism, that Army; Brown; Fordham; Georgetown; Navy; Syracuse; and Pitt should be considered for inclusion alongside the initial EIBL schools. That being said, it is likely that Rutgers may have been considered for admission at one point in time prior to being public and it is known that Rutgers formally inquired about becoming a member in 1953 before being annexed by the State of New Jersey. It has been regularly implied that the College of William and Mary was considered as a peer Colonial College to the core group of Ivy League colleges and considered as a potential candidate for admission to the league prior to its inception.

It is certainly the case that the League has longstanding rivalries and fixtures with both Army and Navy. This lead to speculation in a number of media reports in the 1980s that the League had allegedly considered extending invitations to those service colleges in order to bolster its standing and maintain its participation in the FBS upper divisions of Division I football. Similarly, those same reports indicated Northwestern as another potential candidate. Of the rumours most commonly embraced, however, the most persistent have been attached to Colgate and Bucknell who often compete against Ivy league colleges when not playing in their primary conference – the Patriot League. For some time, the Patriot League emulated the Ivies in their selectivity and their eschewing of athletic scholarships. Albeit, the latter is no longer true.

Outside of these institutions, various names have often been touted, particularly those of similar institutions that may be further afield. Luminaries including: Stanford; Duke; Georgetown; Rice; Emory; Cal Tech; Berkeley; Chicago; Wisconsin; John Hopkins have often been touted as potential or likely candidates for admission to the league. Similarly, MIT; Amherst; Vassar; and, occasionally Carnegie Mellon; Rochester; NYU; or even athletic powerhouses like Holy Cross; Boston College; or Boston University have been postulated. These rumours are often far-fetched given the vast differences in the range of athletics programs and statuses of those programs vis-a-vis the existing Ivy League. More often, these rumours are predicated on the idea that these schools are approaching the Ivy Leagues (or, indeed, exceeding them) in terms of academic pedigree and admissions selectivity. Many commentators have included these schools in the vague terms “Ivy adjacent”, “Ivy Plus”, or “Ivy+”.

The formal inception of the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation in 2011, building on the BorrowDirect scheme that many of the Ivy League university libraries participated in (founded in 1999), put the concept of “Ivy Plus” on a different footing and established the first pillar of the Ivy Plus Consortium. MIT was the first school outside of the Ivy League athletic conference to be invited to participate as it already had an inter-library arrangement with Harvard. The scheme would soon expand to include Johns Hopkins, Chicago, Stanford and Duke. These same thirteen schools would form the core of the Ivy Plus Sustainability Consortium, joined by Georgetown before it expanded to include participation from more than 40 top-rated colleges and universities. Similarly, these thirteen schools would participate in the Ivy Plus Faculty Advancement Network and, with the exception of Johns Hopkins and Duke, the Ivy Plus Exchange Scholars Program (with Berkeley also a member).

No such plans, however, currently exist for Ivy League expansion and it remains unlikely that the league will expand any time soon. For now, the Ivy League remains a grouping of eight top-tier research universities that are benchmarking themselves against their peers across the United States and internationally.

MEMBERS AND ASSOCIATES

CHOOSE LIST VIEW FOR A SIMPLE LIST OF ALL LISTED SCHOOLS. ALTERNATIVELY, YOU CAN SELECT SCHOOLS USING THE MAP BELOW.

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BROWN

BROWN UNIVERSITY

BROWN STREET, PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND 02912, UNITED STATES

PRIVATE UNIVERSITY
RESEARCH UNIVERSITY

ABOUT

ESTABLISHED 1764
FEE-PAYING
CO-EDUCATIONAL
AGES 18+ (UNDERGRADUATE – POST-DOCTORATE)

brown.edu

PROFILE

RHODE ISLAND

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK

1150 AMSTERDAM AVENUE, MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS, MANHATTAN, NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK 10027, UNITED STATES

PRIVATE UNIVERSITY
RESEARCH UNIVERSITY

ABOUT

INC. BARNARD COLLEGE
ESTABLISHED 1754
FEE-PAYING
CO-EDUCATIONAL
AGES 18+ (UNDERGRADUATE – POST-DOCTORATE)

columbia.edu

PROFILE

NEW YORK

AAU

CAAS

COFHE

THE CONSORTIUM

FAN

GULF

ICCS

IPARC

IPES

IPLC

IPSC

IPWC

IVY +

MSCHE

NAICU

STEINWAY

URA

U7+

568 GROUP

CORNELL UNIVERSITY

300 DAY HALL, 10 EAST AVENUE, ITHACA, NEW YORK 14853, UNITED STATES

PUBLIC – PRIVATE UNIVERSITY
RESEARCH UNIVERSITY

ABOUT

ESTABLISHED 1865
FEE-PAYING / NON-FEE-PAYING
CO-EDUCATIONAL
UNDERGRADUATE – POST-DOCTORATE

SCHOOLS AND INSTITUTES:
COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES | COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING | CORNELL INSTITUTE FOR PUBLIC AFFAIRS | CORNELL LAW SCHOOL | CORNELL UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARCHITECTURE, ART AND PLANNING | CORNELL UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL | NEW YORK STATE COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURE AND LIFE SCIENCES AT CORNELL UNIVERSITY | NEW YORK STATE COLLEGE OF HUMAN ECOLOGY AT CORNELL UNIVERSITY | NEW YORK STATE SCHOOL OF INDUSTRIAL AND LABOR RELATIONS AT CORNELL UNIVERSITY | NEW YORK STATE COLLEGE OF VETERINARY MEDICINE AT CORNELL UNIVERSITY | NOLAN SCHOOL OF HOTEL ADMINISTRATION | SAMUEL CURTIS JOHNSON GRADUATE SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT | WEILL CORNELL MEDICINE

cornell.edu

PROFILE

NEW YORK

DARTMOUTH COLLEGE

6016 MCNUTT HALL, HANOVER, NEW HAMPSHIRE 03755, UNITED STATES

PRIVATE UNIVERSITY
RESEARCH UNIVERSITY

ABOUT

ESTABLISHED 1769
FEE-PAYING
CO-EDUCATIONAL
AGES 18+ (UNDERGRADUATE – POST-DOCTORATE)

dartmouth.edu

PROFILE

NEW HAMPSHIRE

AAU

ABC

COFHE

THE CONSORTIUM

FAN

IPARC

IPES

IPLC

IPSC

IPWC

IVY +

MNU

NAICU

NECHE

UARCTIC

12 COLLEGES

568 GROUP

HARVARD UNIVERSITY

1350 MASSACHUSETTS AVENUE, CAMBRIDGE MASSACHUSETTS 02139, UNITED STATES

PRIVATE UNIVERSITY
RESEARCH UNIVERSITY

ABOUT

INC. RADCLIFFE COLLEGE
ESTABLISHED 1636
FEE-PAYING
CO-EDUCATIONAL
AGES 18+ (UNDERGRADUATE – POST-DOCTORATE)

harvard.edu

PROFILE

MASSACHUSETTS

AAU

AICUM

BOSTON CONSORTIUM

COFHE

FAN

GULF

HMA

ICCS

IPARC

IPES

IPLC

IPSC

IPWC

IVY +

NAICU

NECHE

RSI

URA

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

330 ALEXANDER STREET, PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY 08540, UNITED STATES

PRIVATE UNIVERSITY
RESEARCH UNIVERSITY

ABOUT

ESTABLISHED 1746
FEE-PAYING
CO-EDUCATIONAL
UNDERGRADUATE – POST-DOCTORATE

princeton.edu

PROFILE

NEW JERSEY

AAU

COFHE

FAN

GULF

ICCS

IPARC

IPES

IPLC

IPSC

IPWC

IVY +

MSCHE

NAICU

URA

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

PENN / UPENN

1350 MASSACHUSETTS AVENUE, CAMBRIDGE MASSACHUSETTS 02139, UNITED STATES

PRIVATE UNIVERSITY
RESEARCH UNIVERSITY

ABOUT

ESTABLISHED 1740
FEE-PAYING
CO-EDUCATIONAL
UNDERGRADUATE – POST-DOCTORATE

upenn.edu

PROFILE

PENNSYLVANIA

AAU

COFHE

CTTL

FAN

GULF

IPARC

IPES

IPLC

IPSC

IPWC

IVY +

MSCHE

NAICU

QUAKER CONSORTIUM

URA

568 GROUP

YALE

YALE UNIVERSITY

433 TEMPLE STREET, NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT 06511, UNITED STATES

PRIVATE UNIVERSITY
RESEARCH UNIVERSITY

ABOUT

ESTABLISHED 1701
FEE-PAYING
CO-EDUCATIONAL
UNDERGRADUATE – POST-DOCTORATE

yale.edu

PROFILE

CONNECTICUT

AAU

COFHE

THE CONSORTIUM

FAN

FGNU

GULF

IARU

IPARC

IPES

IPLC

IPSC

IPWC

IVY +

LAUNCH

NECHE

STEINWAY

URA

INFORMATION

FULL NAME

COUNCIL OF IVY GROUP PRESIDENTS
IVY GROUP

ESTABLISHED

1945 / 1954

CONTACT DETAILS

COUNCIL OF IVY GROUP PRESIDENTS, 228 ALEXANDER STREET, 2^ND FLOOR, PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY 08540, UNITED STATES

ivyleague.com

+1 609 258 6426

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