10 Things You Didn’t Know About the US Ivy League

It’s become a Halloween tradition at Brown University for students and locals to gather for a midnight organ recital of spooky music, with the lights turned off and creepy costumes on. Resident organist Mark Steinbach, who’s been playing the Halloween concerts for the past two decades, says he loves “changing the way people think about the organ”, and he keeps his costume a secret each year.

The 15^th century ‘Voynich manuscript’, held in Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, is reputed to be the world’s most mysterious document. For years, linguists, mathematicians and code-breakers of all descriptions have attempted to decipher its 240 pages of unknown letters and bewildering images, with occasional breakthroughs being proposed – alongside regular suggestions that it’s some kind of very convincing historic hoax. For those who want to attempt to unlock the book’s secrets, the entire manuscript can be viewed online.

Established in 1906, Alpha Phi Alpha (ΑΦΑ) was the first Greek-lettered fraternity established by and for black students, who had previously been excluded from many these kinds of traditional society. Today the fraternity has more than 400 college chapters, and since 1940 it’s been open to male members of all ethnicities.

While the other Ivy League members all express their college mottos in Latin, Cornell University’s motto is in English: “I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study” – based on the words of founder Ezra Cornell. This approach seems to have impressed motto-lovers; in 2007 it topped Motto magazine’s ‘Top 10 Motto List’.

You probably know (I did, anyway) that Dartmouth College’s (unofficial) mascot is a personified beer keg. But you might not know that its earlier mascot, abandoned in the 1970s, was a Native American figure – and that the use of Native American names and mascots by US college sports teams remains a controversial issue, as this recently published poem ‘If the Indian Mascot Could Speak’ illustrates.

Or at least, the first campus to be called a campus. In the 1770s, Princeton University’s sixth president John Witherspoon used the word ‘campus’ (the Latin for field) to describe the area around the university buildings. This coinage is generally accepted as the first usage of the word in this sense, and it certainly caught on!

More specifically, it’s traditional at the University of Pennsylvania to throw toast onto the field after the third quarter of home football games. This apparently originated from a drinking song that included the line ‘Here’s a toast to dear old Penn’; during the prohibition era, students couldn’t toast their team in the sense of raising a glass of alcohol, so they took a more literal approach.

There are lots, lots more weird and wonderful facts about the Ivy League, I know! What’s your favorite piece of Ivy League trivia, old or new? Share in the comments below.