A tour visiting the eight Ivy League universities

A mix of information and infotainment. Admittedly: a "road movie in words” with in - depth information, statistics and, well yes, pictures. What would an Ivy League Tour without the show? Nevertheless and above all, without containing serious information about each university of the Ivy League, it wouldn’t be a serious book Its composition ( schools and graduate schools). Facts, like number of students, retention rate, entry levels and more. Dry material, but only on the face of it… Statistics have it that they can be sexy too, even colorful ... history? These are eight universities bathing in history. They are history, almost all part of the mythical period, before the United States was the United states. Merely thirteen, insignificant colonies, waiting for a tea-party in Boston. Special events and monuments? Thousands of them. Peripherals like places to see, monuments to look at? Too many to capture with a camera, let alone to put them in words. We hope it all adds up to an eagerness to read our site and our book.A tour – so we thought -- is probably the best concept as it offers a means to stitch eight universities together. In other words, we driving – only so to speak—with actually Daan doing the driving, in all honesty - using the locomotive force to give shape to the narrative of selection and elitism. Prose after all comes from Latin porsum: move forward… Maps? Maps seem so static, don’t they? Maps indicate between the chapters where you are in the USA while you read. A sense of belonging, especially for the European Reader who blames the American citizen’s lack of geographical knowledge…. Geography, you say? It seemed to us an important decision maker , together with history, perhaps even as important as history.... Stories take place well yes in a place…We thought it would be nice to place a university in its surroundings, offering a consistent line of thought, a possibility to envision a finality, while we travel and write, while you read and hopefully wonder ... and like us dream away. This - after all- is a story with an open ending, about institutions ready to continue to write history in the future.We start in the very North: (New Hampshire) Dartmouth – Dartmouth College even though it is Dartmouth University. Old wounds lie deep. Once a school for Native Americans in a colonizing mood now home of the most advanced information technology. An isolated oasis of high learning in a winter wonder land. Vox Clamantis in Deserto… the voice in the very open space …

Driving to Harvard in Cambridge - Cambridge Massachusetts, let’s make that clear! - near to the my(s)thic Boston. We walked around and stared at the vanity of toil, Harvard’s bookstore bookstore made us dizzy…Then off, off forth on swing, riding on the rhythm of one Scott Fitgerlanbd’s tales of the Jazz Age to Providence. Brown University - In Deo Esperamus! Hope! it says on the flag of the great state of Rhode island! But wait a minute, oh waw, was that not the famous MIT we just drove buy. Make a U-turn says the GPS. Top class without belonging to Ivy League, but nevertheless elite and probably in the meantime elitist. Worth a place in the rankings- our last section in the book, even if only not to let Harvard run away with all the prizes… in the end, one of us is a Brown alumnus of sorts. It says clearly on the T-shirt: I went to Brown for Harvard was too easy to get in. The other prides himself on his MIT beanie…He is an engineer, so statistics must have there place in our story. But, Blue state coffee tastes like heaven in the Brown Bookstore! Going deeper then. Down to New Haven, to Yale. It completes the idea of big the Ivies (Harvard and Yale) and smaller lesser known Ivies- Dartmouth and Brown. It shows immediately how variegated the old university landscape of Ivy League can be. They are all Ivy League, but there is variety in the unity, or should we say it the other way around… E pluribus unum? Also here? Or especially here given the history? Some outspokenly keen on tradition, others unmistakably modern. One example might be the way in which Brown has implemented the acquisitions of the revolutionary year 1968. A strange curriculum and extremely modern for those who‘d consider Ivy League "frozen in time" and for those European educators who swear by strict departments and faculties. Nevertheless a way to position oneself within the Ivy Club … New York’s Columbia is next on the road, with an incursion to upstate New York viz. Cornell University. Strange and exciting that such an old Ivy can be found in the modern bustling city of New York. Morningside Heights – the place of kernel Columbia needs to be part of the whole. It is beyond doubt something the reader, esp.. The European reader might not expect. And yet Columbia is expanding in the newest technology with a new campus in the Manhattan Ville area. Modernizing the curriculum while modernizing, renovating the forlorn parts of the Big Apple. .Forlorn, going back to the Dutch word: verloren-lost; a Dutch taint, always present in New York.With some strange things going on: Cornell Tech in the heart of New York City and is probably competition for the new campus of the old Columbia? Cornell in New York City offers a way out and an inroad at the same time to talk about Ivy League Cornell....Far away from the coast... an Ivy which is one of mixed blessings: both private and state, a latecomer, nevertheless part of that other important slot in American history: the industrial revolution.Then southwards towards New Jersey – home of famous Princeton University. A magnificent campus and one street which is actually the center of the town: Nassau Street. We had fun there…Also the place where Einstein’s house can be found. Facing it: relativity is the answer to many things… Finally, ending in U Penn in the city of Philadelphia- home to Benjamin Franklin, the founding father who founded also a university. He must indeed have been a learned man. Philly, The first capital of the young republic , the United States of America… The town of Brotherly Love, the statuette on the town hall - watching, controlling, mesmerizing…The history will also show how the colonial colleges before turning in USA Universities came into being due to religion and thanks to private funding. In this respect it is good to underline that Rutgers and Duke also existed prior to independence but turned into state financed colleges and are thus not part of Ivy League. Curse or Blessing? The reader will be able to tell after the last pages of the book are turned.