<p>Did anyone else catch the gaffe in the movie, The Aviator, where Leonardo DiCaprio (Howard Hughes) says about his competitor Alec Baldwin (Juan Trippe) that he’s always depised those “Ivy League types?” He says the line in the historical time frame within the movie in about 1943 or 1944. The Ivy League wasn’t founded for another 10 years – in 1954, long after the movie ends.</p>
<p>You should submit that to some of the “movie goofs” sites. i checked with several and didn’t see that one (although they had plenty of others).</p>
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The term Ivy League has come to signify 8 premier universities that over the years have had common interests in scholarship as well as in athletics. Stanley Woodward, New York Herald Tribune sports writer, coined the phrase in the early thirties. In 1936, the undergraduate newspapers of these universities simultaneously ran an editorial advocating the formation of an Ivy League, but the first move toward this end was not taken until 1945. In that year, the eight presidents entered into an agreement for the purpose of reaffirming their intention of continuing intercollegiate football in such a way as to maintain the values of the game, while keeping it in fitting proportion to the main purposes of academic life. <a href=“http://www.cornellreview.org/viewart.cgi?num=102[/url]”>http://www.cornellreview.org/viewart.cgi?num=102</a></p>
<p>Another movie anachronism I once noticed: in A Beautiful Mind when Russell Crowe is enrolling at Princeton in the 1940s, he is wearing a necktie that has the double helix DNA structure on it (meant to be a nerd’s tie I suppose). Watson and Crick did not discover the structure of DNA for another 10 years or so.</p>
<p>I read an interesting story about the Ivy League in the fabulous book written by Bill Mayher “College admissions mystique”. </p>
<p>In the book, he describes how the seven main colleges (current Ivies less Brown) needed an 8th college to avoid byes in the football schedule. They had a decision to make between Brown and Colgate -apparently a superior school in the 50s. Brown won because it was perceived as geographically more desirable. </p>
<p>The book also relates how Brown used very clever marketing techniques to rise from the basement of the Ivy League. One of the techniques involved rejecting a great number of candidates who were shoo-in at Harvard or Yale. The most brilliant, however, was to align itself with the schools who rejected ED for the less stringent EA. In this case, Brown could have used ED but gambled to be “grouped” with Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. </p>
<p>The rest is history. It worked quite well for the UPS school: the ugly toad became a prince.</p>
<p>Xiggi – heard another thing about Colgate and the Ivy League. It’s true about Brown being in Rhode Island getting the advantage since Colgate would’ve been the third New York school in the Ivy League – and it was only an hour’s drive from Cornell (but so is Brown from Harvard and Yale from Columbia). The Ivy League was orginally 10 schools, according to another history, the present eight plus Army and Navy. When Army and Navy pulled out early on, they asked Colgate and Georgetown to join, but Georgetown wouldn’t give up its Jesuit status to do so. They then went to Johns Hopkins but that would’ve meant revamping their entire D-3 athletic program and they found it cost-prohibitive. That left Colgate alone as the 9th Ivy. About 30 years later, Colgate, Army, Navy and Georgetown got together with Holy Cross and three colleges in Pennsylvania (Bucknell, Lehigh, Lafayette) to form the Patriot League which often competes against the Ivies in non-league contests. </p>
<p>As for Colgate being a superior school to Brown in the 50s, that may still be the case in the eyes of many who disapprove of Brown’s current political and social liberalism. However, Brown’s selectivity has increased markedly in the last 10 to 15 years when it tired of being the Ivy “safety” and rejected overly qualified applicants who were obviously making it a safety. The strategy worked – and it has since been copied by several other schools, most notably those in the Patriot League including Bucknell, Holy Cross and Colgate which is rejecting applicants accepted by Harvard, Cornell and Dartmouth, e.g. Of course, the hardest colleges to get into remain Army and Navy because of their arduous and rigorous admissions process and requirements.</p>
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<p>This has appeared on CC a few times … it just doesn’t look right to me for a couple reasons. First, I’ve read 3-4 historical books/accounts on the IVY league and this never appears in those. Second, I am an old sports records groupie, and the old schedules of the current IVY league schools do not support this … for example, looking at old football schedules before the IVY league was formalized the current IVY league schools pretty much played a round-robin schedule each year (I’ll have to check on Brown) however they very seldom played Army or Navy … this was true for most major sports. That said for many minot sports the IVYies did (and do) compete with Army and Navy … for example, the heptagonal games for track … so maybe those talks did occur</p>
<p>As an addendum to my post #6, there’s also the story that when Johns Hopkins decided not to become the 10th member of the Ivy League, that Tufts was approached. But because Tufts is almost literally the next town over from Cambridge (and Harvard), the idea was quickly tabled. So much for geographic diversity in 1954.</p>
<p>I think that the waters will remain murky … :)</p>
<p><a href=“http://brownbears.collegesports.com/facilities/brownfield.html[/url]”>http://brownbears.collegesports.com/facilities/brownfield.html</a></p>
<p>The stadium’s current capacity is 20,000, although a record crowd of 33,000 witnessed Brown face Colgate on Thanksgiving morning, 1932, with portable bleachers being brought in for the game. </p>
<p><a href=“http://www.brown.edu/Administration/Brown_Alumni_Magazine/96/10-95/features/stadium.html[/url]”>http://www.brown.edu/Administration/Brown_Alumni_Magazine/96/10-95/features/stadium.html</a></p>
<p>On the penultimate Saturday of the season, before a capacity crowd (the first advance sellout since 1932) and a national television audience, Brown battled Harvard for the Ivy League Championship. Brown lost and settled for second place.</p>
<p>PS FWIW, in the book “The Gatekeepers”, there is an account of a student referring to JHU as an Ivy. The author of the book advances that JHU always denied having been invited to the Ivy League.</p>
<p>There are several schools other than Colgate that also have “Anti-Ivy” Day to celebrate NOT entering the Ivy League when supposedly asked.</p>
<p>There’s got to be some Urban Myth stuff in all this…</p>
<p>** collegeparent - johns hopkins was never asked or considered to be part of the ivy league. if you read the gatekeepers, you may remember that when Jordan is rejected by both ivy league schools he applies to, he soothes himself by saying he got into JHU, which was offered to be an ivy. The author of the book asked a representative at Johns Hopkins if this were true and the representative said that no such thing has ever occured.</p>
<p>a lot of these urban legends pop up when students who equate the quality of a shcool on ivy league status attempt to find a way to affiliate their school with ‘the league’. ive heard a bunch of these legends, but most if not all are untrue.</p>
<p>All are untrue. </p>
<p>Read this: the best account of how the Ivy League was formed.</p>
<p><a href=“Penn: Page not found”>Penn: Page not found;