Quote:
Originally Posted by ree-Xi
/hijack/ Sorry, I have to giggle at the term "Southern Ivies". The schools you reference are not Ivy League, for two reasons: The term "Ivy League" originally referred to a eight private schools in the NCAA athletic conference. More contemporary usage of the term "Ivy League" referrences the group as the country's oldest, academically prestigious universities. (Thank you WIKI). As someone who has lived in the northeast my entire life, I had never heard the term "southern ivies" until about a year ago, and it was here. It just seems like an odd concept to me. /end hijack/
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And yet it's a concept that has been around for at least 50 years or so. In the late 50s/early 60s, Vanderbilt invited four other Southern private schools -- Southern Methodist, Rice, Duke, and Tulane -- to form a new athletic conference: a "Southern Ivy League" (also called the "Magnolia League"). While there was some interest for a while, it never came to pass. SMU and Rice didn't want to lose their share of Cotton Bowl income, and Duke was not willing to forgo its traditional rivalry with the University of North Carolina. Since that time, the term "Southern Ivies" has been used widely in the South, though without an established definition or list of schools, to refer to schools that can be seen as Southern counterparts to the (northern) Ivy League. Sometimes it is used to to refer only to private schools, sometimes public schools like UVa or UNC (both included in
Richard Moll's original 1985 list of "public ivies").
Too bad that your lifelong confinement to the northeast has led to ignorance and giggles.
