User:Dpbsmith/Southern Ivies

Saving this because I might want to have some of the material available, particularly the references, in case it gets undeleted or re-created in a less-satisfactory-to-me form.

Southern Ivies is a poorly defined term. Colloquially, a college or university may be called an "Ivy" to show that in the speaker's opinion it is comparable to the schools of the Ivy League in some way—usually in academic quality or in social prestige. Thus, any distinguished private college in the southern United States may be called a "Southern Ivy."

Whereas the Ivy League is an athletic conference with a defined membership, the designation of "Southern Ivy" has no official meaning, and which schools make up the list is a matter of opinion.

In the 2006 U.S. News and World Report rankings, Duke University, Rice University, Vanderbilt University, and Emory University rank in the top twenty, as do all the schools of the Ivy League. Duke, at number 5, is clearly in the same company as the Ivy League schools, ranking below four of them above four of them. Brown, the lowest Ivy, ranks number 15, with Rice, Vanderbilt and Emory ranking just below, at 17, 18, and 20 respectively.

The term is used in casual conversation both among academics and in terms of the sports programs of the various universities.

In addition to these private schools, the South includes a number of "Public Ivies." Moll's original list of eight "Public Ivies" included four southern schools: The College of William and Mary, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Virginia. The University of Florida is sometimes considered to be a "public Ivy" as well.

Various Southern schools have sometimes been called the "Princeton of the South." This appelation has been applied to Sewanee, Davidson College, the University of Richmond, Samford, and Rice, as well as Duke and UNC. "Harvard of the South" is popular as well, and one humorous essay asserts that "there are two dozen Harvards of the South distributed among the states that seceded to form the Confederacy. Of those eleven states, only Alabama does not claim to have a single HotS ['Harvard of the South']." The University of Florida may have |officially given itself this designation.

Robert Franklin Durden (1998) says that in the 1890s, the Biddle Memorial Institute (now Johnson C. Smith University) considered itself to the "Colored Princeton of the South." Tuskegee, Morehouse, and Hampton have each been referred to as the "Black Harvard of the South."

Since the 1950s, there have been a number of failed efforts to create a "Southern Ivy League" athletic conference. On an official level, there was a grassroots effort in the late 1990s to establish a Magnolia League that was to be a Southern answer to the Ivy League. Emory, Vanderbilt, Tulane, and other private universities participated in this effort.

References

Durden, Robert Franklin (1998): Lasting Legacy to the Carolinas, Duke University Press, ISBN 0822321513, p. 121.

See also

Ivy League Public Ivies Magnolia League