Sport: Non-Poisonous Ivy

No matter what sports writers say, there is no actual Ivy League. But the figment took a half-step toward fact last week. The presidents of Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Pennsylvania, Princeton and Yale signed an expanded version of an old Harvard-Princeton-Yale agreement—no “athletic scholarships,” no first-year men or scholastic delinquents on varsity teams, no post-season games—in short, strictly antiseptic amateur football. Members are not required to play each other, and no formal championship will be at stake. Far from forming a league comparable to the Big Ten, the ivy-covered institutions were merely seeking to “maintain the value of the game while keeping it in fitting proportion to the main purposes of academic life.”