Harvard University was modeled on Cambridge University in England, where John Harvard, the founder of the college and its first president, studied. At first, he instructed only teachers, professors, and priests, granting them degrees. In time, Harvard College added a law school and a medical school, turning into a university which also granted PhDs. It was the first college and university in the United States, celebrating three hundred years of existence in 1936.

Yale College was established four years later, in 1640, as the second institution of higher education in the United States. It was modeled after Oxford in England.

The new university models in New England were based not only on the old universities in England but also on their emulation of each other, embodied in their brilliance in academic studies and athletics. In time, however, Cambridge started emphasizing the development of science as opposed to theology, and so it ended up generating the highest number of Nobel Prizes in physics. Oxford held on to its emphasis on theology and linguistic studies, becoming the nurturer of the English language, whose dictionaries it publishes. It is nevertheless true that some of the greatest English poets, such as Byron and Wordsworth, studied at Cambridge, not Oxford. The latter produced Shelley and Wilde, but without treasuring them as students because of their reservations against theology. Which means that the realist and liberal spirit of science is more favorable not only for freedom but also for poetry.

A similar opposition existed at first between Harvard and Yale, too, the first taking its realistic spirit of science from Cambridge, the second adopting the classical spirit of Oxford. In this century, however, Yale parted with the classical spirit of its old model and integrated itself into the realistic and scientific spirit of our century promoted by Harvard.

To the exact sciences, the new president at Yale added humanities, due to the following favorable circumstances. A former Harvard alumnus became very rich and wanted to leave his entire estate to his alma mater, on the condition that the old building of the college be replaced with a new one, with new desks.