Big Three Types

In H.R. Stoneback's Reading Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio, 2007, [pages 8-9]

"In Robert's freshman year, 1909, Princeton admitted the largest number of Jewish students in its history--thirteen--a number not surpassed until the 1920s. (In comparison, Harvard admitted seventy-one Jewish students in 1909.) Princeton long had the lowest Jewish student enroll-[8]ment of any Ivy League institution--in 1918, for example, Princeton's total was 30, Harvard's 385, Penn's 596, and Columbia's 1,475 (Synnott 16, 96, 181). Edwin Slosson's 1910 volume, Great American Universities, reported that anti-Semitism was "more dominant at Princeton than at any of the other" major universities he studied; it was commonly said that "if the Jews once got in," they would "ruin Princeton as they have Columbia and Pennsylvania" (105-6). ... In the characteristic early twentieth-century view of the typical student at the "Big Three" American Universities, the Yale Man, known for "conformity," had to be "athletic, hearty, extroverted," and the Harvardian, known for "individualism," was associated with "intellectualism" and "eccentricity"; but the Princetonian had to be "neither a strong individualist...nor a conformist," and what mattered most was to be "'smooth'--that is, socially adroit and graceful" (Synnott 4).

Synnott, Marcia Graham. The Half-Open Door: Discrimination and Admissions at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, 1900-1970. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979.

Slosson, Edwin E. Great American Universities. New York: Macmillan, 1910.