Welcome to the Ivy League—

These eight snow-capped pillars of Liberal Education have dominated their field since long before US News & World Report published its first annual college rankings—and long before their overworked admissions officers staggered under just too many applications from too many super-achieving candidates.

Q: How did these schools, modest in their beginnings, become the stuff of dreams?
A: This Ivy has roots!

We are Ivy League alumni from the 1960s, ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, and we’ve launched this Web publication to explore the Ivies’ deep roots, and to show that the qualities that founded these eight pillars can bear all the weight that a globalized, post-modern society two-and-a-half World Wars and a blaze of technology later can heap on them.

We’ve done plenty of digging over the years, and it leads us to conclude that these academies rose to preeminence because their founders and their like-minded successors held convictions strong and true enough to propel them there. These are roots worth uncovering, and the men who embodied them are worth emulating.

Anyone who sets out in search of his roots runs a risk: Who will turn up? A poet, a priest or a pirate? A hero—or a traitor? We don’t choose our ancestors. We’ll either embrace them as dear, lost kin or we’ll turn and leave their mementoes moldering in the attic, regretting we disturbed them.

The Ivy League universities spring from roots that most in our generation find, in a word, inconvenient. These schools grew out of enterprising Christian faith. Their founding reflects a conviction that society, in all its dimensions, is enriched and revitalized through it. The founders of Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and their brother institutions promoted nothing less than full-scale engagement of faith and character, alongside intellect and training, in academic life and throughout society.