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.
[6] 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.
[7] However, when Vanderbilt team beat the Bulldogs by a score of 35–0, Yale declined to play any further games against the Commodores.
[8] Later that year,[8] 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.