Harvard too liberal for Yale which was too liberal for Princeton…
Did you know that Yale was started because Harvard was considered too liberal? And then Princeton was started because Yale and Harvard were both consider too liberal? Evidently, Brown University, started by the Baptists, was an exception to this trend. “A recurring pattern in the progression of college-founding is that disputes over religious beliefs were a driving force for groups either to be expelled from an established college or to leave it because they felt that it had fallen from religious grace. Cotton Mather, dissatisfied with both the religion and the politics of Harvard University, saw the young Collegiate School in Connecticut (Yale University) as a welcome opportunity to restore to Congregationalism the purity that he and others felt Harvard had lost. The subsequent efforts of Connecticut’s Congregationalists to purge the colony and its college of Anglican stirrings demonstrated that the fusion of religion and higher education in the eighteenth century placed more importance on orthodoxy than on interdenominational goodwill. The later founding of the College of New Jersey (Princeton University) by New Light Presbyterians was in large measure an effort to create an institution that acknowledged some elements of the Great Awakening, as established Harvard and Yale did not.
Indeed, the College of Rhode Island (Brown University) stands as the major exception to this relative lack of tolerance and accommodation within collegiate communities of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.”
Harvard, Yale, Princeton were basically public colleges
“Constructing a clear picture of the colonial colleges can be problematic for historians in the twenty-first century because these institutions did not adhere to the categories of “public” and “private” that shape our thinking about organizational taxonomies today. Even though Harvard, Yale, Brown, and Princeton all claim to be “independent” institutions today, in the 17th and 18th centuries each was indelibly linked to its colonial government.
This linkage was reflected in the original names. Princeton was the College of New Jersey, Brown was the College of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. No Harvard commencement ceremony could begin without the procession led by the sheriff of Middlesex County, and no degree could be awarded without approval of a board whose membership by statute included the governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony.” (from Thelin’s History of Higher Ed)
Deep Thoughts on Higher Ed 