<p>I can assure everybody that MIT wouldn’t want to be part of the Ivy League, even if such an affiliation were ever offered. One part of the MIT class ring each year has the beaver (MIT’s mascot) sitting on a pile of eight ivy leaves. The symbolism is left as an exercise to the reader.</p>
<p>MIT wouldn’t even name the bridge right next to their campus the “The MIT Bridge”</p>
<p>Instead, The pompous school down the river was given the opportunity to name the bridge “The Harvard Bridge.”</p>
<p>MIT is not snooty or elitist like the Ivy league schools. They know they are better and have no need to join an exclusive club to verify that.</p>
<p>Stanford might be a candidate… but I think PAC-10 is very profitable for them… and probably a premise for Stanford’s departure would be to invite UC Berkeley into the Ivy league as well… (Stanford would want to continue it’s age old rivalry)… Duke is another option but Duke is profiting from ACC basketball, lacrosse, and etc… so much by fueling the rivalry they have with UNC… California is very far and Duke is very far as well…</p>
<p>UChicago is D3… Northwestern is another candidate. It basically tries to emulate the Ivy league in every shape and form… from changing their color to purple (because elite east coast schools have single colors, not double colors!) to their their logo, to trying to foster an academic and student athlete D1 type atmosphere… Chicago and Northwestern are kinda far from the Northeast.</p>
<p>I would have recommend Johns Hopkins to replace UPenn but we are D3 except in mens lacrosse (where we dominate!)…</p>
<p>What about Georgetown? What other D1 schools in the Northeast that are Ivy caliber type schools… Is Amherst D1?</p>
<p>Tufts has the location in fits in academically better than MIT. They are missing the sports, though.</p>
<p>It may be a sports league, but that’s really only one product of the tie that binds the schools (at least seven of the eight; Cornell is both a historical and geographic outlier). The other seven Ivy League schools are the seven oldest private universities in America, and along with William & Mary and Rutgers (both public), seven of the nine universities in existence in Colonial America. They’ve been associated with one another for hundreds of years, grew athletic programs to prominence at roughly the same time, and then de-emphasized athletics around the same time once big-time athletics outgrew the Ivies’ mission. That’s why they’re all in the same athletic conference - schools with similar histories, values, and academic standards sought one another out as appropriate sports rivals. The Ivies’ affiliation begat the sports league - not the other way around.</p>
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<p>That’s true. It should be noted that Rutgers was invited when the league was formed, btw.</p>
<p>It really is just a long-standing tradition of cooperation amongst the institutions that grew from their location and age, nothing else.</p>
<p>Most of us who are in the Ivy League don’t think we’re better because of it-- I know I don’t I know that the “Ivy League” thing had nothing to do with me choosing Brown (it was the only Ivy I ultimately applied to). I don’t know anyone who walks around saying they go to an Ivy League school, we say we go to Brown.</p>
<p>I don’t think Stanford, MIT, CalTech, Duke, Mich, Cal, JHU, etc are getting the short shrift because of the lack of “Ivy”, and I’d think the students there would take offense to that and probably should.</p>
<p>OP: to even imagine that schools like tanford, MIT, CalTech, Duke, Mich, Cal, JHU, etc would even consider being courted by the Ivies is an affront to their own fine traditions and affiliations. It’s equivalent to saying:" You aren’t yet complete. You simply must join us dah-ling!"</p>
<p>Insulting and condescending to those fine schools (and I’m an Ivy alum)</p>
<p>Apparently, some time or the other, Georgetown, Johns Hopkins, and Carnegie Mellon were all asked to join the Ivy League, and they all declined for their own unique reasons.</p>
<p>Vassar was asked to join Yale. <em>shrug</em></p>
<p>"In [1936] urging them to consider “Army and Navy and Georgetown and Fordham and Syracuse and Brown and Pitt” as candidates for membership, [John] Kieran exhorted:</p>
<pre><code>“It would be well for the proponents of the Ivy League to make it clear (to themselves especially) that the proposed group would be inclusive but not ‘exclusive’ as this term is used with a slight up-tilting of the tip of the nose”."
</code></pre>
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Agreed. Stanford, MIT, Duke, Chicago, et al do perfectly well on their own and have a unique flavor. I think any of them would be insulted by such an invitation.</p>
<p>It would be excellent if MIT joined the Ivy League. In an intense hockey game, can you imagine what an unfair advantage they would have with all those pens flying from their pocket protectors?</p>