More about colleges: the Ivy League

Ivy League refers to the eight oldest universities in the United States…sort of. 

The College of William & Mary in Virginia is the second oldest institution of higher learning in America, and it’s not in the Ivy League. Why not? Either: (1) because it’s south of the Mason-Dixon line, in the former slave state of Virginia and so would have been shunned by the eastern Establishment when the concept of Ivy league was formulated; or (2) because it’s a public university supported by the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Being a publicly funded university also seems to exclude Rutgers University, the main state university of New Jersey.  Rutgers probably would have been a strong contender in that it was founded in Colonial times as a university of a protestant denomination, as were the other Ivy League colleges.  Rutgers was Dutch Reformed.
The denominational affiliation of the Ivy League colleges is as follows: Harvard was Congregationalist; Yale was stricter Congregationalists who broke away from Harvard in a theological spat in 1701 and headed to their “New Haven”; Dartmouth was Congregationalists who wanted to teach Christianized Indians in the wilds of northern New England (if they could only find one who hadn’t died of smallpox or fled to Quebec); Brown was Baptist, a denomination who had fled persecution is Massachusetts to their new home of Providence (meaning God will provide); Princeton was Presbyterian, University of Pennsylvania (please call it Penn and not U.Penn!) was at least vaguely Quaker; and Columbia (aka King’s College before the American Revolution) was good old Anglican.  All were founded in colonial times as institutions of higher education focused on classical education (Yale required entering students to know Latin or Greek until 1970) or training ministers (Brown required its president to be a Baptist minister until the 1950s)…wait what about Cornell?

Oh yeah, then there is Cornell in upstate New York.  It is cut from a different cloth, an example of a great university (as opposed to a college that grew into a university) begat all at once by the grant of funds by an industrialist in the years immediately following the American civil war.  The other private universities of similar ilk include Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, Case Western in Cleveland, etc.

These days, the Ivy League colleges have many peers.  That's another thing: for the most part, it's the undergraduate college that counts socially.  Getting a masters in education, say, from Harvard isn't the same as graduating from Harvard College.  The peers include Stanford University, Duke University, Northwestern University, Georgetown University (the best Catholic university speaking of religious affiliations), University of Chicago and perhaps a half dozen other institutions.