PRINCETON, N.J., June 3 -- As many as four universities
will be invited to join the Ivy League, which seeks to
form major college athletics' next superconference, the
league said in a surprise announcement.
The expansion, the first since the league was formally
chartered in 1954, signals that the nation's most prestigious
association of schools will reassert itself as an athletics
power, nearly a century after Harvard stopped paying players
and left the tradition to Penn.
The first new invitation was extended to Georgetown
as a symbolic apology for the years of Catholic antagonism
fostered by the eight charter members, all who have long
histories as WASP finishing schools.
Colgate, in Hamilton, N.Y., also was invited to join.
Texas A&M and Nebraska round out the four invitees.
The raids on members of the Big East and Big XII set
off a domino effect as those conferences moved to replace
their memberships. The ripple effects also could be felt
at preparatory schools throughout the east, where guidance
counselors ended the decades-long practice of encouraging
"just-in-case" applications to Georgetown. Virginia
is now the "safety school" of choice.
"The addition of these quality institutions strike
the balance of unsurpassed academic reputation and world-class
athletic achievement," said Jeffrey H. Orleans, executive
director of the Council of Ivy Group Presidents, as the
league is formally known. "Plus, adding the coed
populations of Nebraska and A&M should consign the
phrase 'uglier than a Barnard-Radcliffe mixer' to antiquity."
News conferences in College Station, Texas, and Lincoln,
Neb. were delayed when top officials there soiled their
entire wardrobes after receiving and accepting the surprise
bids. Texas A&M, which does not even have a Phi Beta
Kappa chapter, placed athletics boosters in charge of
overseeing an overhaul of standards to Ivy-type compliance.
The duty also fell to Nebraska boosters, who within hours
rammed several bills through the state legislature.
Their aim is to drive down acceptance rates to the Ivy
League maximum of 9 percent, yet maintain an enrollment
that can still pay the bills. That means applications
must triple for each school while the incoming freshman
class remains constant.
Texas A&M's Committee on Book Smarts announced it
would dust off George W. Bush's original, lesser-known
"affirmative access" proposal from when he was
governor of Texas. It waives the admissions fee for all
black applicants, then rejects them.
Nebraska lawmakers attached a rider to a mandatory pledge-of-allegiance
bill, directing all of the state's kindergartners to compose
admissions essays. Early admission will be tendered only
to each class' top finger-painter. The top spit-bubble
blower may reapply in his junior year.
The two schools' membership is on a five-year provisional
status, requiring not only the overhaul of school admissions
criteria but the continued practice of paying $500,000
for Division I-AA football teams to visit them.
Nebraska head coach Frank Solich aired concerns with
meeting those payments, citing the state's multimillion-dollar
budget crisis. "We've got (former coach and current
congressman) Tom Osborne working on a subsidies bill for
that," he said. "The timing may be a little
tight."
In return, Nebraska and A&M will never have to play
a road game in the Ivy League, Orleans, the league director,
said.
The conditions for admitting A&M and Nebraska were
acceptable to all eight charter universities. Georgetown,
opposed by Brahmin alumni of Harvard, and Colgate, looked
down on by Cornell, faced tougher roads.
Cornell begrudgingly removed its opposition to its neighbor
to the east, after being told if it insisted on Colgate's
exclusion it would have to expel all agriculture students
and divest the parts of its university that accept State
University of New York tuition rates.
Colgate alumni, for their part, had lived for years with
teeth-gnashing bitterness that they were never Ivy Leaguers
despite the fact graduates of a land grant college (Cornell)
were. Colgate's nickname, The Red Raiders (Cornell is
the Big Red) reflects generations of one-sided observance
of that rivalry.
Still, the two will only play each other in alternating
years in football, after being placed in separate non-geographic
conferences.
In the Early Admission Division, Harvard, Yale, Princeton,
Columbia, Colgate and Nebraska will face one another.
The Wait List Division is comprised of Georgetown, Dartmouth,
Penn, Cornell, Brown and Texas A&M.
In football, The champions of their respective divisions
will meet in a December title game to be played at Giants
Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J..
Volvo and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
have been wooed as possible sponsors of that game.
-Owen S.
Good
