Magazine Article Praises Big Ten Over Ivy League

"The Ivy League has had the past; the Big Ten will have the future," Paul Engle of the University of Iowa asserted in the March issue of Holiday, rebutting the article, "The Ivy League Colleges--Their Natural Superiority," by Henry Morton Robinson in the November 1955 Holiday.

Engle wrote, "It is in the arts, in fact, that the Big Ten can rub that uplifted Ivy League nose in the poison ivy." He further claimed that the Big Ten's "flourishing orchestras are impossible at universities like Princeton and Harvard, which lack the breadth of talent and the broad integration of music into the curriculum."

Turning to the personality of the Ivy League man, he noted the "Inner Complacency which is common in the Ivy League," and a "uniformity of the sort that makes an Ivy League campus look as if its students had all gone to the same prep school at Conformity Corners."

Engle allows that the Ivy League has some good aspects, "selectivity and unique quality," and that it is supreme "in the limited area of undergraduate education," but adds, that "under the conception that the whole state is the campus, the Big Ten is supreme."

Engle supported his view by giving examples of the varied activities of the state universities, which range from splitting hogs to designing girdles.