Ivy-covered Nassau Hall (built 1756), the original building of Princeton University, a large stone building with a cupola
19 February 2021
This name for the group of prestigious northeastern U.S. colleges dates to the 1930s. It is a reference to the old, ivy-covered buildings on those campuses.
Even before the league was so named, the schools in the Ivy League operated as an informal collegiate athletic association that originally had ten members: Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, Yale, and the U.S. Military and Naval Academies at West Point and Annapolis. The schools scheduled games and meets with each other and made attempts to create a formal league, but there was no formal organization until 1954 when the league was formalized under the auspices of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). The eight private schools are members (i.e., without the two military academies; despite what its name may imply, the University of Pennsylvania is a private institution, not a state school). It played its first games as a formal organization in 1956.
The earliest reference to the grouping that I’m aware of is in the form ivy colleges in the pages of the New York Herald Tribune of 14 October 1933. The other schools mentioned here are who the proto-Ivy League football teams were playing that week; they are not among the ivy colleges:
A proportion of our Eastern ivy colleges are meeting little fellows another Saturday before plunging into the strife and turmoil. In this classification are Columbia, which will meet a weak Virginia team; Harvard, which will engage New Hampshire; Dartmouth, which is playing Bates; Brown; which is meeting Springfield; Princeton, which will strive against Williams; Army, which is paired with Delaware, and Penn, which is opening its season belatedly against Franklin and Marshall.
The form Ivy League appears two years later in an Associated Press piece from 7 February 1935 about an early attempt to formalize the league with Brown University (i.e., the Bruins or Bears) as a member:
BRUINS QUALIFY FOR IVY LEAGUE BY LONG HISTORY
Has Friendly Relations With Members; Army and Navy Not Likely Members
NEW YORK, Feb. 7.—(AP)—The so-called “Ivy league” which is in the process of formation among a group of the older Eastern universities now seems to have welcomed Brown into the fold and automatically assumed the proportions of a “big eight.”
Sources:
Associated Press. “Bruins Qualify for Ivy League by Long History.” Columbia Record (South Carolina), 7 February 1935, 12. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. Ivy League, n.
Woodward, Stanley. “Navy Eleven Travels to Pittsburgh Today.” New York Herald Tribune, 14 October 1933, 16. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Photo credit: Anonymous photographer, 2012, public domain image.
Source:
ADS-L.