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Executive Director Jeffrey Orleans

jeff@ivyleaguesports.com


Jeffrey Orleans has been Executive Director of the Council of Ivy Group Presidents, and in that capacity the chief executive officer of the Ivy League athletics conference, since his appointment in 1984 as the Council’s first full-time Director; he is one of the country’s longest-serving conference commissioners. In this tenure he has developed the Ivy Office’s administrative, governance, championship and public information functions in serving the unique goals of Ivy League athletics: to have high academic standards, broad-based participation combined with athletic excellence, and athletic activities that contribute to student-athletes’ overall educational and personal experiences and growth.

Orleans’ recent assignments have included the development of extensive changes in the Council’s rules for athletic admissions, recruiting and off-season athletic activities; initiating the 2006-07 Internet-based commemoration of the Ivy League’s 50th Anniversary, the 1997-99 nationally-recognized “Silver Anniversary Celebration” of Ivy League Women’s Championships, and the Ivy League’s award-winning annual on-line features for Black History Month; negotiating a series of league-wide national television and satellite radio agreements; and directing the process that formulated the Council’s original policies with regard to international fair labor (“sweatshop”) standards.

Orleans serves or has served on the NCAA’s Division I Management Council, Restructuring and Gender Equity Task Forces, and Financial Aid and Women’s Basketball Issues Committees; as an officer of the Collegiate Commissioners’ Association; and on the Executive Board and other committees of the National Association of College and University Attorneys (NACUA). He was named a NACUA “Fellow” in 1990, is a past Editor of NACUA’s Journal of College and University Law and co-edited its compendium, Legal Issues in Intercollegiate Athletics. In 2000-01 and 2001-02 Orleans created and co-taught courses within Princeton’s Freshman Seminar program focusing on ethical values in athletics, sponsored by Princeton’s University Center for Human Values.

A 1967 cum laude graduate of Yale College, Orleans was a 1967-68 Coro Foundation Fellow in Public Affairs in San Francisco before graduating from Yale Law School in 1971. He served from 1971 to 1975 in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare’s Office of General Counsel, where he was a principal author of the original implementing regulation for Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, and in the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. As a Special Assistant to the President of the University of North Carolina system from 1975 to 1984, he had significant oversight responsibility for the system’s 16-campus desegregation plan and for other campus and system-wide legal and governance issues, especially faculty discrimination and due process and state-wide implementation of Title IX.

Orleans is a member of the Advisory Board of Princeton University’s Pace Center for Civic Engagement and a past Co-President of the Princeton High School Regional Scholarship Foundation. He is married to C. Tracy Orleans, Ph.D., Distinguished Fellow and Senior Scientist at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; they have two children, Jesse (28) and Alexander (18).