President John Sloan Dickey (left) with football Coach Bob Blackman

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A Brief History of the Ivy League

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A Brief History of the Ivy League

Your Dartmouth student is in the Ivy League now—that small group of private institutions in the Northeast that enjoy a reputation for selectivity and academic excellence. Yet however it is perceived today, the Ivy League began life as a football conference.

The name “Ivy League” is credited to newsman Caswell Adams, who first coined the term in the New York Herald Tribune in 1937 to describe the football teams of certain elite Eastern colleges. His fellow journalists saw it as foreshadowing an eastern football league—a novel idea to everyone except the schools' athletic directors.

For years, the Ivy colleges—Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Cornell, University of Pennsylvania, Brown, and, of course, Dartmouth—had competed against one another in basketball, baseball, and swimming. After much discussion among them, the first “Ivy Group Agreement” was signed in November 1945.

Although initially it applied only to football, it affirmed the observance among the eight institutions of common practices in eligibility requirements, the maintenance of high academic standards, and the absence of athletic scholarships, which the schools adopted for other sports in subsequent revisions of the agreement in the 1950s. That approach—embracing both athletics and academics as a central element of the undergraduate experience—has allowed the Ivy League schools to compete successfully in Division I athletics while maintaining the highest academic standards.

Dartmouth president John Sloan Dickey was a guiding force in the creation of the Ivy League, beginning with the original 1945 agreement. During the 1960s, Dickey promoted a plan for equitable distribution of income from football telecasts among all the Ivy League members. Today, the Ivy League has come symbolize academic excellence and spirited athletic competitions.

(Reference: The first Ivy League Football Guide, written by William H. McCarter in 1954. McCarter served as Dartmouth's athletics director from 1937-54.)