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That comparison is less useful than you’d think. It’s extremely difficult to attract brilliant professors to a brand new university. Penn was organizing large-scale excavations in the Near East while Duke remained a small Methodist-affiliated southern LAC. It didn’t become a university in the present sense until the early 1930s.</p>
<p>Of course, being founded relatively late hasn’t hurt Chicago in its collection of Nobel laureates (despite their often exceedingly tenuous ties to the university), particularly since it was founded to be a research university.</p>