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.^[1][2] 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.

Duke

Vanderbilt

Virginia

Washington and Lee

North Carolina

William & Mary

Davidson

Emory

Wake Forest

Georgia Tech

Florida

Richmond

Miami

Georgia

Tulane

Virginia Tech

Furman

Elon

Clemson

James Madison

NC State

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Universities commonly considered Southern Ivies
Blue: Public; Red: Private
* Due to map limitations, universities located in Texas are not depicted.

The following universities have appeared in lists of Southern Ivies and top-ranked universities in the Southern United States.

Duke

Georgia Tech

Rice

Southern Methodist

Tulane

Virginia

Vanderbilt

Washington University

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Universities considered at various times during the 1950s and 1960s for a "Southern Ivy League" athletic conference

Following World War II, many small private universities, such as Vanderbilt, began to struggle to compete against larger public universities in American football.^[5] 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.^[5] 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.^[6] However, when Vanderbilt team beat the Bulldogs by a score of 35–0, Yale declined to play any further games against the Commodores.^[6]

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.^[7] Later that year,^[7] 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.^[8] 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)^[9] to discuss forming a new conference, referred to as either the "Southern Ivy League" or the "Magnolia Conference".^[10] However, the proposed conference never came to fruition.^[10] 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.^[9] While discussions of a Southern Ivy League persisted, often including Duke, Rice, Southern Methodist, Tulane, and Vanderbilt, the conference never materialized,^[11] and by the early 1960s, the plan had been retired.^[12]