<p>In the second half of the 19th Century, going into the 20th Century, the universities to emulate were those in Germany, not England. It was only after World War I that the fashion swung back to trying to look more like Oxford and Cambridge and less like Konigsberg or Heidelberg. Famously, the Harkness family – Yale alumni through and through – offered Yale a huge grant to create residential colleges. When Yale dithered about accepting it, they offered it to Harvard instead, which snapped it up. Then they gave Yale the same grant anyway.</p>
<p>A little-known fact is that the University of Chicago put a very similar “house” system in place from its very earliest years in the 1890s, three decades before Harvard or Yale. But Chicago never put the money into it that Harvard and Yale did, thanks to the Harknesses, in the 1930s, and so the system has never been anywhere near as meaningful there as it is at Harvard and Yale. I believe John D. Rockefeller also funded development of a house system at Vassar at the same time.</p>