@JHS, I’m pretty certain that many of the early LACs that became Ivies were discriminatory in their own way and did not take in any and all religious denominations. How accepting was Harvard (and the Bay colony as a whole) of Quakers and Anabaptists, for instance?
Also, Cornell, MIT, Chicago, JHU, and Stanford were all founded about the same time and looked to Germany as a model for research universities (not to each other).