Cambridge/New Haven - They are the crème de la crème of the colleges in the United States. This, at any rate, is how the eight private schools comprising the Ivy League, in the north-eastern of the country, like to see themselves. And their assessment is shared by many. The "Ivies," as the schools are sometimes called, attract not only students and professors but also tourists. Brown, Cornell, Princeton, Dartmouth and Yale are in small-to-medium size cities situated picturesquely on bodies of water. The other three are in or near big cities: Columbia (in New York City), Harvard (outside Boston) and Pennsylvania (in Philadelphia) or "Penn."
The Ivy League, precisely speaking, is the league for intercollegiate sports to which the eight colleges belong. The term, a reference to the many ivy-covered buildings on their campuses, is said to have been coined in 1933 by one Stanley Woodward, a sportswriter for the now defunct New York Herald Tribune newspaper. Woodward wrote of "Ivy colleges" in an article about the football season.
With the exception of Cornell University, on Cayuga Lake in Ithaca, New York, all of the schools were founded before the American Civil War (1861-1865).
One of the best-known is Yale University, on Long Island Sound in the Connecticut city of New Haven. Its students can constantly be seen entering and exiting a striking neo-Gothic building that looks like a cathedral. The "Yalies" are not as religious as it seems, however, because the building, which has a seven-storey tower, is not a house of worship but a library.
The architect, James Gamble Rogers, designed the library in the image of a cathedral, complete with frescoes and high ceilings. He also ordered some 3,300 handmade windows depicting a host of things that students encounter in their studies, from literary and historical figures to small insects.
Officially, the building is called the Sterling Memorial Library after a major patron. But like almost all important buildings on the Yale campus, it has a nickname. Richard Tao, a 21-year-old American of Chinese ancestry, said his fellow Yale students called it "the cathedral of knowledge."
Tao, who is attending Yale on a scholarship, could have chosen another top university on the strength of his academic credentials.
"But I wanted to go to this university because it has such a good reputation," he said. "And I wanted to study on the East Coast."
Yale's story begins in April 1638, when about 500 Puritans sailed south from the Massachusetts Bay Colony and founded a community that came to be know as New Haven. In 1701, the colonial legislature of Connecticut chartered the Collegiate School there. The school was renamed Yale College in 1718 in gratitude to the Welsh merchant Elihu Yale, an early patron.
"We go to Harvard or Yale or Princeton because these universities provide the best opportunities for the future," explained Adam Lathram, a philosophy student at Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
For some students with rural backgrounds, the Ivy League schools are the first taste of urban life and international neighbours, particularly in the cases of Columbia, Harvard and Pennsylvania.
"It's both a blessing and a curse," said Lathram, whose school is separated from Boston by the Charles River. "You want to - and have to - study to get good grades, but at the same time you have got this huge city with all its possibilities right across the river."
During tours of Ivy League colleges, visitors hear a lot about customs and rituals. One of the nicest customs is at Brown University, in the Rhode Island capital Providence. The school's heavy iron Van Wickle Gates remain closed except on two occasions, said Brown student John Smith: "Once inward to admit students on their first day at the university, and once outward when they have graduated and go out into the world."
On the campus of Harvard University, visitors find a bronze statue of a good-looking man to be quite amusing. The John Harvard Statue is also known as "The Statue of Three Lies" because none of the three statements inscribed on it - "John Harvard, Founder, 1638" - is true.
"Look at his foot," urged Lathram, the aspiring philosopher. The well-polished appendage shone in the sun. "That's a ritual of ours," he said, explaining that students rubbed John Harvard's shoe for luck before examinations.
On the internet: www.discovernewengland.org, http://nycgo.com, www.nj.gov/travel, www.brown.edu, www.columbia.edu, www.cornell.edu, www.dartmouth.edu, www.harvard.edu, www.upenn.edu, www.princeton.edu, www.yale.edu
