Daily News | Federal lawsuit takes aim at Ivy League’s policy of no athletic scholarships
“We hope that this lawsuit will bring Ivy League athletics into the 21st century by subjecting these universities’ treatment of Ivy League athletes to the antitrust laws, just as the courts have applied such laws to all other NCAA Division I athletic programs,” said Eric Cramer, chairman of the firm Berger Montague, one of the attorneys for the Ivy athletes, in a press release.
This issue has been percolating for several years. A pair of 1972 University of Pennsylvania graduates, Alan Cotler and Robert Litan, both attorneys, sent a letter in 2021 to the presidents of the eight Ivy League schools and assorted others within the Ivy leadership structure with an eight-page memo calling into question whether the Ivy League will be able to continue to ban athletic scholarships. The letter began, “We respectfully write to you concerning the recent United States Supreme Court decision in NCAA v. Alston and how it affects the Ivy League’s long-standing policy of providing financial aid based on need only.” The reference was to a 2021 Supreme Court decision when the high court upheld a district court ruling that the NCAA can’t enforce certain rules limiting the education-related benefits such as postgraduate scholarships or other resources that colleges offer athletes as long as those are educational benefits. Their memo was meant to be a legal analysis, looking at the Alston case, why it was defined narrowly by the plaintiffs, who had no interest, for instance, in how it could be applied to the Ivy League, which has traditionally not offered athletic scholarships because it has not offered merit scholarships of any kind. They said they did not get any response from any Ivy administrators. In 2021, George Hay, a professor of law and economics at Cornell, said he wasn’t sure the Ivy League was on tenuous ground if you’re just looking at the league as a sports league — taking overall merit aid out of the antitrust equation — noting that the Alston decision allowed for sports leagues to have their own rules. “If the Ivies had to compete for students, as other schools do now through merit scholarships of many different kinds, and by offering athletic scholarships for sports in which individual schools wanted to excel, the Ivy schools’ endowments are more than ample to allow them to do so while continuing to provide full need-based aid to all,” Cotler and Litan wrote in the 2021 memo.
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