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The only full-time executive director the Ivy League has employed is retiring.

Jeffrey H. Orleans will step down June 30, 2009, after 25 years of service to the Ancient Eight. Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania and chair of the Council of Ivy Group Presidents, made the announcement yesterday in a statement.

A national search for Orleans's successor will begin this fall. The composition of the search committee, four women and two men, reflects the evolution of the Ivy League from bastions of male privilege to institutions of equal opportunity. Gutmann and Drew Gilpin Faust, the first female president of Harvard, will oversee the search with James Dwight, who is retiring as Dartmouth's president in 2009. The advisory committee includes M. Dianne Murphy, director of athletics at Columbia; Janet Dickerson, vice president for campus life at Princeton, and James Miller, dean of admissions at Brown. Barbara Stevens of the firm Isaacson, Miller will conduct the search.

Orleans, a graduate of Yale and Yale Law School, joined the Ivy League in 1984 as its first full-time executive director. He has succeeded in maintaining the high academic standards of the eight elite universities while fostering a broad and competitive approach to athletics. In certain sports (rowing, ice hockey, lacrosse) Ivy League athletes still compete at the highest level. The league's glaring failure during his 25-year stewardship has been the stubborn refusal of the presidents to allow the Ivy League football champion to become eligible for the NCAA Football Championship Subdivision playoffs.