@JBStillFlying Where do I start.
Here are a few examples
When Woodrow Wilson was President, the image of Princeton was described in his “Report on the Social Coordination of
the University” and it landed like a bombshell as described in the book. Unlike today, the University was known as “the pleasantest country club in the United States,” with absolutely no academic rigor. Wilson’s observance as quoted in the book is very revealing. Wilson tried hard, but lost the fight to ban the eating clubs with their rigid class structure and contempt for anything intellectually rigorous.
The different paths taken by Chicago and Stanford in recruiting faculty and the reputations both universities had at that time is also interesting.
As stated in the book
The faculty of Stanford was subject to criticism because their achievements in these lines are not so superior to other
universities…Then, again, the professors at Stanford are at something
of a disadvantage in not being judged by their own achievements, but are naturally compared with the first faculties of two other universities similarly founded within our memory, Johns Hopkins and Chicago…
The University of Chicago was started about the same time as Stanford University, but Presidents Harper and Jordan adopted opposite policies. President Harper, although he
had a much smaller endowment, paid unprecedentedly high prices for men of established reputation in Europe and
America, regardless of age, race, color, or previous condition of servitude; “headliners,” we used to call them. President Jordan, on the contrary, selected young men of promise, mostly those he had personally known in Cornell and Indiana.
This is specially interesting given the rabid anti-Semitism and racism that flourished in HYP at that time
Maybe that is why the author’s introduction to Chicago starts like this:
"IN our time three universities have been raised from the seed : Johns Hopkins, Leland Stanford, and Chicago. The youngest and greatest and most original of these is the University of Chicago. Scarcely had its cotyledons appeared above the surface of the Midway soil when it was seen to be a new species, a mutant. Though now that it is full grown it looks more like the rest of the genus
than we thought it was going to, still there is enough that is novel about it to make it interesting.
And some like @marlowe1 would claim, that’s still true 
Chicago always does things a little differently
There are many more interesting titbits in the book which I personally found fascinating, specially given the reputations these universities enjoy today