Ivy League Eastern Intercollegiate Baseball League; they were later joined by Harvard, Brown, Army and Navy. Before the formal establishment of the Ivy League, there was an "unwritten and unspoken agreement among certain Eastern colleges on athletic relations". The earliest reference to the "Ivy colleges" came in 1933, when Stanley Woodward of the New York Herald Tribune used it to refer to the eight current members plus Army. In 1935, the Associated Press reported on an example of collaboration between the schools: Despite such collaboration, the universities did not seem to consider the formation of the league as imminent. Romeyn Berry, Cornell's
Black Ivy League First Lady Michelle Obama; college basketball coaches Craig Robinson (also Michelle Obama's brother) and John Thompson III; and former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Samuel Pierce. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas earned his bachelor's degree at a non-Ivy school, but earned his J.D. at Yale Law School. In 2004, the Institute for Research in African-American Studies (IRAAS) at Columbia University sponsored an academic conference entitled "Growing Black Ivy" which drew 200 scholars to discuss black participation at elite Ivy League institutions. Competition for top students have grown more intense. For example, Cornell announced a change in its financial aid