Talk:List of Ivy League university presidents

Heading
The title for this article is erroneous. Dartmouth College is not a university. The original title for the article is more accurate: Ivy League Presidents.

article move
I'd like to propose moving this article to List of Ivy League presidents List of Ivy League university presidents, as this is just a list of the schools' chief administrators, rather than a true article on those administrators and their histories and impacts. Esrever (klaT) 00:19, 27 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Actually, I'd insert the word university in the article name, too, as the Ivy League itself (the athletic conference) has its own chief executive. This new name would prevent confusion. Esrever (klaT) 00:21, 27 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Agree. clariosophic (talk) 17:21, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

Categories
This article has way too many categories. See: Categorization, where it says, inter alia: "Categorize articles by characteristics of the topic, not characteristics of the article. A biographical article about a specific person, for example, does not belong in Category:Biography."

I trimmed the categories once, but was promptly reverted.

Only the following categories belong here: clariosophic (talk) 17:58, 27 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Category:American university and college presidents
 * Category:Ivy League


 * Agree with above. There is absolutely no reason to have this many categories on this article. Esrever (klaT) 19:37, 31 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Given that there was no opposition over the last couple of days, I just went ahead and made the above change. If anyone disagrees, we can discuss more here, but I really don't see the need to include anything beyond the above two categories. Cheers! Esrever (klaT) 15:59, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

section and subsection names
I deleted the subsection headers for things like "List of Presidents of New College and Harvard College", as they're messy to look at and clutter up the article. There's no real text (as opposed to lists and tables) associated with any of those sections, so having a subsection makes no sense. If you wanted to put a new sentence in before the lists (something like, "This is a list of presidents of Harvard University (formerly known as New College (16XX-16XX) and Harvard College (XXXX-XXXX)," I should think that would be fine. But overuse of wikiformatting is just extravagance. :) Esrever (klaT) 23:58, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

Categories and Format
The purpose of this article is to provide its readers a discrete overview of the historic evolution of the leadership of all eight Ivy League universities as well as of the names for each respective college or university from the foundation of the first Ivy League university in the 17th century through the American Revolutionary period through the Industrial Revolution to the present. Unfortunately, the original formatting for this article has been distorted by another editor so that the evolution of names of the respective colleges or universities is no longer attractively presented as an indented heading under the modern name for each institution. Hopefully, that can be corrected by someone else with more advanced skill in Wikipedia editing.

One of the central purposes of the categories feature is to allow researchers of Wikipedia to consult category listings to find articles pertaining to the respective categories. A cursory review of the biographies of the pre-revolutionary leaders of these institutions will reveal that the figures presented in this evolving article uniformly played leading roles in religion, government or other significant endeavors during the 18th century colonial era and at other times. As all students of American Revolutionary history know well, battles among the leaders of various religious sects on American soil played a central role in the establishment of principles of religious freedom. Several of the figures who presided prior to 1776 were directly involved in many of these controversies. As for the performance of these leaders during the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, the majority of these leaders played leading national roles either directly in their area of formal scholarship or as prominent academic administrators or educationists. The direct interest of these figures to their respective alumni communities is of obvious clarity.


 * Well, rather than let this degenerate into an edit war, I'll simply point out that both of these things were addressed above. The purpose of this article isn't to provide a history of all eight Ivy League schools and their names; that's why the schools have their own articles. Rather, it's a list of the chief administrators of those institutions. The historical school names are listed immediately below the appropriate section headers, which makes sense. As currently formatted, it looks awkward and clunky.


 * As to your second point, this article isn't about those Ivy League leaders. It's simply a useful list of those individuals. If you want to categorize individual leaders into things like "Alumni of Pembroke College, Oxford", then create articles about those individuals and categorize them appropriately. This list doesn't belong in those places, though. Esrever (klaT) 01:46, 7 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Entirely agree, Esrever, with your points. For further evidence that adding all these categories is a misunderstanding of the purpose of categorisation, one only has to look at the result on a Category page (for example Category:Evangelical Anglicans, which surely ought simply to show those individuals who are indeed Evangelical Anglicans. This is surely a list Category (see WP:CATEGORY).  For this article, can we please revert to the two categories as outlined in the Categories section above, as proposed by Clariosophic. Carbonix (talk) 21:01, 14 July 2009 (UTC)


 * I've reverted back to the previous version of this article. User:Sammy Houston hasn't really made any sort of response to the above points. Esrever (klaT) 03:50, 19 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Unfortunately, my schedule will not permit me to respond to these suggestions until the middle of August. Many thanks for the diligent efforts to improve the format and substance of the article.  However, for now the categories and format should be maintained in their originally intended condition.


 * Unfortunately, that's not really how Wikipedia works. No one "owns" the articles, so any editor is free to make changes at will to articles. There's a warning under the edit summary box to this effect: "If you do not want your writing to be edited, used, and redistributed at will, then do not submit it here." When disputes arise over content, we make decisions by consensus. Your version of this article does not have consensus (and, to be fair, neither does mine), as indicated by the above comments on this talk page. Neither of us can "freeze" the article until such-and-such time, either. If editors choose to make changes, that's just what will happen. Esrever (klaT) 13:34, 19 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Any thoughts on this? Esrever (klaT) 03:15, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

The way forward...
This is a very problematic article that should be broken up into its component parts. First, there's nothing significant about being an "Ivy League president" that is distinct from being "President of X University." Second, the Ivy League is a sports conference. Third, the Ivy League didn't exist until 1954, why are there president dating back to the 17th century? This seems to be an amenable solution, per Articles for deletion/List of Ivy League university presidents.--GrapedApe (talk) 01:22, 11 March 2012 (UTC)
 * All of the material has been split into constituent articles. Per Copying within Wikipedia, this article should remain for licensing purposes. — Preceding unsigned comment added by GrapedApe (talk • contribs) 14:25, 11 March 2012 (UTC)
 * I disagree with converting this into a redirect to Ivy League. The topic is not really covered there and the content that was here didn't get sent to there. Instead, I would support the AfD closer's recommendation "converted to a disambiguation page", so that this page actually helps readers find the former content and idea of its topic. Until moments ago, there were inbound links that really did have as their context and intent a single point-of-entry into the presidents of all Ivies, not information about the Ivy League itself. DMacks (talk) 20:00, 11 March 2012 (UTC)
 * I guess I would be OK with the DAB. But, I went through and pointed all relevant links to the right article.--GrapedApe (talk) 22:23, 11 March 2012 (UTC)