Ivyletter sets out to be a spiritual successor to Ivygate, which was a blog that covered the Ivy League, which beyond the construct itself means an infinite number of things, and also nothing. There are schools older or ranked higher than some in the Ancient Eight. Many of them are similar in environment, sentiment, and purpose. When did we agree that it would be these eight: Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, UPenn, Princeton, and Yale?
The year was 1936. The Princetonian published an editorial titled “Now is the Time.” For what? “For the formation of an Ivy League” in football. This editorial in particular was concurrently published throughout the Ivy League papers at the time. And their case was, expectedly, elitist.
“The seven colleges involved [excluding Brown] fall naturally together by reason of their common interests and similar general standards, and by dint of their established national reputation they are in a particularly advantageous position to assume leadership for the preservation of the ideals of intercollegiate athletics -- a leadership which could prove much more effective than the present conflicting, disjointed and confused attempts made by individual universities.”
Of course, reading this 84 years later is amusing when next fall, there will be no Ivy League sports. It was already a league of its own when it rejected the NCAA’s guidance regarding fifth-year athletes affected by COVID-19. And, outside the League, collegiate football fans have always looked elsewhere.
The colleges we consider part of the Ivy League are much older than that editorial. So too is their obsession with ivy. In the 19th century, both Yale and Princeton had class traditions of planting ivy at the base of a campus building. As described in the Columbia Daily Spectator in 1879, this was done “in hopes that the present bare walls may some of these days be covered with beauty.” Graduates of Yale in 1890 sung an “Ivy Ode” during class day exercises, printed in the Yale Daily News for posterity.
Older than all of these obsessions, I surmise, is the League’s perception of self. For years, the schools had competed against eachother informally, and planned to continue doing so without any conference or league. If they needed one, in the words of Romeyn Berry, Cornell's then intercollegiate relations director, “it will be organized not to increase gate receipts or publicity, but because it has to be created to protect the philosophy of amateurism in its last stronghold.” The students, per the editorial, disagreed; the philosophy needed a league.
Since nothing can be discussed in a vacuum, per The Rise of Fall of Olympic Amateurism, we are talking about an Anglophone philosophy, “commonly defined as being ‘about doing things for the love of them, doing them without reward or material gain or doing them unprofessionally.’” Born in the later 19th century, amateurism arose as a elitist response and rejection to the industrialization of spectator sports of the English masses, a combination of “insurgent middle-class Puritanism with romanticized aristocratic notions of valor and chivalry.” It believed in the civilizing power of sport and its ability to be a great equalizer, while seeing itself as necessarily seperate from the merely popular.
Of course you can see this admittedly complicated (the authors, not me) concept charitably. In 1945, the eight schools, now including Brown, came up with “academic standards and eligibility requirements and the administration of need-based financial aid, with no athletic scholarships” governing football and applying to all intercollegiate sports in 1954. These are students, after all, and they should be “permitted to enjoy the game as participants in a form of recreational competition rather than as professional performers in public spectacles." At the same time, outside football and basketball, many of Division I sports are built on middle class high school programs, white middle class high school programs, from which admission to these elite colleges with certain amateur athletic qualifications becomes plausible.
We start therefore with a hypothesis, for which reporting may prove or disprove: the Ivy League is the last bastion of waspy professionalism which disdains the rest of the country that begrudingly lets it lead. The last US president not to walk through the Ivy-covered halls was Ronald Reagan. Trump, the populist who called Columbia “disgraceful” and Harvard “ridiculous” transferred to UPenn (with an allegedly fake SAT score). As long as this publication is a thing, I hope to learn why that tension works: as an aspiration, as a target of resentment, as a cultural marker.
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