I agree about the animus, @itsallgood123 , but I don’t think it’s quite fair to attribute it to OP, whose interest was in a discussion of differences of ethos between the schools. In particular he/she referenced two very salient issues - free speech and curriculum. These are both big deals at Chicago. Illuminating comparisons could have been made to Stanford without the animus.
The original heat mostly came from reactions against the piece by the young Stanford writer - a long series of attacks on her writerly skills, the accuracy of her description of the Hoover controversy, and especially her conclusions and even her character in respect of her complaint over the deletion of fencing and other sports at Stanford. There was a lot of politics in those attacks. They had nothing to do with the OP’s question and nothing to do with the University of Chicago. Eventually we got round to a connection with Chicago. That discussion dealt intermittently with larger questions, but there was an awfully lot of bean-counting of courses and hours in order to bolster the boast of supremacy in “rigor”. This even, crazily, devolved at one point into whether a particular exam in a Chicago calculus class was up to snuff. There was animus in that discussion as well, but it was not that of the OP, who had asked us a question about ethos in two specified areas - free speech/academic freedom and “approaches to undergraduate education at two elite universities”. Sigh.
We have let the OP down, but all the same a lot of interesting territory has been covered in this thread. Some thin skins have been exposed along the way. That’s life. We are human here.