Southern Ivy

Southern Ivy is a term used to describe a university in the Southern United States that is comparable to a university in the Ivy League, usually from the perspective of having a similar level of academic quality or social prestige.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn Unlike the Ivy League, which is an established group of eight universities in the Northeastern United States, there is not a fixed standard for what constitutes a Southern Ivy, and different sources may list different universities, depending on their criteria. The term "Southern Ivy League" is also used to refer to a proposed athletic conference that would have included several Southern Ivies.

List of universities

The following universities have appeared in lists of Southern Ivies.

College	State	Public or private?	References
Duke University	North Carolina	Private	Template:SfnTemplate:SfnTemplate:SfnTemplate:Sfn
Rice University	Texas	Private	Template:SfnTemplate:SfnTemplate:SfnTemplate:Sfn
Vanderbilt University	Tennessee	Private	Template:SfnTemplate:SfnTemplate:SfnTemplate:Sfn
University of Virginia	Virginia	Public	Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill	North Carolina	Public	Template:Sfn
College of William & Mary	Virginia	Public	Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn
Davidson College	North Carolina	Private	Template:Sfn
Emory University	Georgia	Private	Template:SfnTemplate:SfnTemplate:Sfn
Wake Forest University	North Carolina	Private	Template:SfnTemplate:SfnTemplate:Sfn
University of Texas at Austin	Texas	Public	Template:Sfn
Southern Methodist University	Texas	Private	Template:SfnTemplate:SfnTemplate:Sfn
Tulane University	Louisiana	Private	Template:SfnTemplate:SfnTemplate:SfnTemplate:Sfn

Proposed athletic conference

Template:Location map+ Following World War II, many small private universities, such as Vanderbilt, began to struggle to compete against larger public universities in American football.Template:Sfn In the Southeastern Conference (SEC), the Vanderbilt Commodores, which had fielded competitive teams in the early 20th century, struggled against other teams and by the 1940s was running a deficit in its athletics department.Template:Sfn In the late 1940s, Vanderbilt Chancellor Harvie Branscomb hoped to reposition the university's football team as a more low-budget program by creating rivalries with Ivy League universities, and to this end he scheduled a 1948 game against the Yale Bulldogs football team.Template:Sfn However, when Vanderbilt team beat the Bulldogs by a score of 35–0, Yale declined to play any further games against the Commodores.Template:Sfn

Around 1951, Branscomb attempted to organize a new athletic conference that would have been a Southern equivalent of the Ivy League with universities such as Duke, Rice, Tulane, Virginia, and Washington University in St. Louis joining Vanderbilt, though the effort failed, prompting Branscomb to remark that his university was "located in a spot where ivy does not seem to flourish.Template:Sfn Later that year,Template:Sfn Branscomb proposed a series of changes to the SEC's regulations that would have helped Vanderbilt's teams, but these were rejected by the administrators of the other universities in the conference.Template:Sfn In the late 1950s, Branscomb secretly held a meeting with the presidents of five other Southern universities (Duke, Georgia Tech, Rice, Southern Methodist, and Tulane)Template:Sfn to discuss forming a new conference, referred to as either the "Southern Ivy League" or the "Magnolia Conference".Template:Sfn However, the proposed conference never came to fruition.Template:Sfn In the cases of Duke and Georgia Tech, the two universities did not want to jeopardize their in-state rivalries against the University of North Carolina and the University of Georgia, respectively, while Rice and Southern Methodist did not want to give up their share of income from the Cotton Bowl Classic.Template:Sfn While discussions of a Southern Ivy League persisted, often including Duke, Rice, Southern Methodist, Tulane, and Vanderbilt, the conference never materialized,Template:Sfn and by the early 1960s, the plan had been retired.Template:Sfn