Before the Ivy League was formally defined as it is today, it was an informal arrangement of seven schools (Brown was not included). The current list has seven schools founded before the American Revolution plus Cornell. Why was Brown omitted originally? Why is Cornell included? Is it more than just an athletic conference?
Apparently, it's complicated. "Some theorize that Ivy is actually a misnomer and the league was originally called the IV League because it consisted of four schools: Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Dartmouth." An alternative story being that the label was coined by a reporter, referring to age and an old-fashioned climbing plant. The number grew over time, and there is now a proposal to include Stanford, MIT, Northwestern and The Universtity of Chicago. Of course, they don't fit geographically and probably have no ivy crawling up their walls.
