BTW I have never ever heard anyone ever call GA Tech ivy league. Where did you hear something like that?
Some have called MIT Ivy League, then I guess they lump in Ga Tech. Although Georgia was one of the origial colonies I don't think they had a college back then, or not one that lasted. I don't think any Engineering Schools are Ivy League, except maybe West Point, if you can call it an engineering school. I think Mercer may be the oldest school in Georgia, or maybe Oglethorpe, not sure.
The term Ivy League started out as a sports term......over time, it came to mean more than that:
Origin of the name
The first usage of "Ivy" in reference to a group of colleges is from sportswriter Stanley Woodward (1895–1965).
“ A proportion of our eastern ivy colleges are meeting little fellows another Saturday before plunging into the strife and the turmoil. ”
—Stanley Woodward, New York Tribune, October 14, 1933, describing the football season[22]
According to book Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins (1988), author William Morris writes that Stanley Woodward actually took the term from fellow New York Tribune sportswriter Caswell Adams. Morris writes that during the 1930s, the Fordham University football team was running roughshod over all its opponents. One day in the sports room at the Tribune, the merits of Fordham's football team were being compared to Princeton and Columbia. Adams remarked disparagingly of the latter two, saying they were "only Ivy League." Woodward, the sports editor of the Tribune, picked up the term and printed the next day.
Note though that in the above quote Woodward used the term ivy college, not ivy league as Adams is said to have used, so there is a discrepancy in this theory, although it seems certain the term ivy college and shortly later Ivy League acquired its name from the sports world.
The first known instance of the term Ivy League being used appeared in the Christian Science Monitor on February 7, 1935[23][24][25] Several sports-writers and other journalists used the term shortly later to refer to the older colleges, those along the northeastern seaboard of the United States, chiefly the nine institutions with origins dating from the colonial era, together with the United States Military Academy (West Point), the United States Naval Academy, and a few others. These schools were known for their long-standing traditions in intercollegiate athletics, often being the first schools to participate in such activities. However, at this time, none of these institutions would make efforts to form an athletic league.
Ivy covering West College, Princeton UniversityThe Ivy League's name derives from the ivy plants, symbolic of their age, that cover many of these institutions' historic buildings[citation needed]. The Ivy League universities are also called the "Ancient Eight" or simply the Ivies.
A common folk etymology attributes the name to the Roman numerals for four (IV), asserting that there was such a sports league originally with four members. The Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins helped to perpetuate this belief. The supposed "IV League" was formed over a century ago and consisted of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and a 4th school that varies depending on who is telling the story.[26][27][28]
However, representatives from four schools, Rutgers, Princeton, Yale and Columbia met at the Fifth Avenue Hotel in Manhattan on October 19, 1873 to establish a set of rules governing their intercollegiate athletic competition, and particularly to codify the new game of college football (which at the time, largely resembled what is currently called rugby[29]). Though invited, Harvard chose not to attend. While no formal organization or conference was established, the results of this meeting governed athletic events between these schools well into the twentieth century.[30][31]
en.wikipedia.org |
