How Vandy Bested the Ivies
As the college prepares to open a NYC campus, its ascent from “good” and “fun” to elite appears nearly complete.
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When I heard Vanderbilt University was opening a campus in New York, my first thought was, Well, I hope KA moved its cannon.
For decades, the Vanderbilt chapter of the Kappa Alpha fraternity had a Civil War–style cannon that it displayed sometimes on its lawn, sometimes in its basement, but usually pointed toward the North. Now that the 153-year-old Tennessee university was expanding northward, I wondered if the frat repositioned it. If not, the school would be pointing the cannon at itself.
A Vanderbilt fraternity could get away with a little the-South-will-rise-again humor back when nobody was paying much attention to it. But things are different now. Over the last few years, Vandy, as it’s affectionately known, has become one of the most desired and admired schools in the country. At a time when only 42 percent of Americans say they have a lot of confidence in higher education, and as other schools face a spate of crises — an increasingly antagonistic White House, the existential threat of AI, administrative uncertainty about how to handle student protests — the university has emerged as a bit of an apolitical fantasy land. It accepted just 2.9 percent of regular-decision applicants, and although its overall acceptance rate won’t be available until late August, a university official told me it’s expected to be about 4.8 percent, which would make Vanderbilt almost as hard to get into as Yale was last year.
The school consistently ranks in the mid-teens in the U.S. News & World Report’s annual lists of best colleges. Its men’s and women’s basketball teams, its women’s soccer team, even its football team are good now. Town & Country magazine called Vandy the “It” school. The British Times named it “the New Harvard.” And in about a month, the university will take over most of a city block in Chelsea, which will allow roughly 90 undergraduates to “study abroad” in New York, interning for such beloved local institutions as JPMorgan and McKinsey like some sort of Wolf of Wall Street–meets–Felicity fever dream. “It’s just gotten harder and harder to get into and more and more coveted,” said Nikki Geula, the founder of Arete Educational Consulting in Manhattan. “I’m not exaggerating when I say it’s on 85 percent of my students’ lists,” echoed Christopher Rim, a college-admissions consultant who works primarily with the ultrawealthy in Manhattan. “It’s the Ivies, MIT, Duke, Stanford, Vanderbilt.”
To the Northerners blissfully unaware that a fraternity had been pointing a cannon at them all this time, Vanderbilt’s rise seemed to come out of nowhere. But this reputational makeover has been in the works for decades. I know this because I graduated from Vanderbilt in 2004, back when 38 percent of high-schoolers who applied to Vandy got in — and watched from afar as the university spent the next 20 years becoming fancier, less southern, and considerably more selective. It had a plan to become popular, and that plan worked.
Almost all of the 7,300 undergraduates who attend Vanderbilt University live on its main campus, which consists of more than 340 lush, magnolia-tree-laden acres that run along Nashville’s main drag, West End Avenue, about a mile and a half from the honky-tonks and country-western bars for which the city is famous. Brand-new condos, luxury hotels, Pilates studios, and at least one outpost of a New York cocktail bar surround it. Vandy is so close to Nashville’s nightlife scene that a freshman with a fake ID but no car could walk there (not that I’d know anything about that).
Like the city blossoming around it, Vanderbilt feels at times like a permanent construction site — “They’re always either tearing something down or building something new,” Jade McDaniel, a sixth-year Ph.D. student in biomedical sciences, complained to me — but the core of the university’s campus remains unchanged: charming grass lawns crisscrossed by paths leading from one stately redbrick building to another. At the center of campus sits an imposing brick clock tower called Kirkland Hall that is often described as Vanderbilt’s oldest building, though the original burned in a 1905 fire, so this one is largely a reconstruction.
The university is named after its founding benefactor, Cornelius Vanderbilt, the New York shipping magnate (and great-great-great-grandfather of Anderson Cooper) who in 1873 was persuaded by the husband of one of his wife’s cousins to donate $1 million toward the creation of a Methodist university in the South. Other than money, Vanderbilt wasn’t very involved in his namesake school and never actually visited it; he died less than four years after it was founded. Today, he is memorialized by a bronze statue that sits near the entrance to campus and also by the university’s athletic teams, which compete as the Commodores — a naval rank that had once been Vanderbilt’s nickname. At sporting events, a student wearing a plush costume that looks vaguely like a 19th-century ship captain dances around as jubilant fans shout the maritime-themed rallying cry, “Anchor down!”
For the first hundred-odd years of its existence, Vanderbilt was known as a nice southern school, the kind of place where boys with Roman numerals at the end of their names could get a good education before marrying a debutante and taking a job at their father’s law firm. Two decades ago, about half of all Vandy students came from the South. “It was a little bit concerning for some more traditional southern families, people from well-educated, ‘good’ families, to go to the Northeast or the Ivies for college,” said Ben Wildavsky, a visiting fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the author of books about higher education. “Instead, they’d go to Vanderbilt.”
Vanderbilt was safe. Traditional. Sure, technically the university started desegregating in 1953, a year before Brown v. Board of Education, but it took over a decade to integrate and the number of Black students who attended was perpetually small. As recently as the late 1960s, women were required to wear skirts or dresses to class and weren’t allowed to leave campus unless their parents signed a permission slip. These rules had disappeared by the time I was there — I hail from the era when liberated millennials walked around with the word JUICY written in script across the butt of velour track pants — but an unofficial tradition of dressing up endured. Even now, many men wear blazers and women often wear dresses and heels (or cowboy boots) to football games.
One of the weirder aspects of Vanderbilt culture was an insistence on referring to the school as “the Harvard of the South,” a nickname that dates back to at least 1875 and is sometimes still jokingly thrown around by students and alumni. “People would get a B on a test and say, ‘Eh, it would’ve been an A at Harvard,” recalled Daria Camacho, who graduated in 2004. At one point, the Vanderbilt bookstore sold a cream-and-crimson T-shirt printed with the slogan HARVARD: THE VANDERBILT OF THE NORTH. I knew at least one student who bought it.
This forced association with Harvard always felt to me like Vanderbilt was trying too hard. For one thing, Duke University placed higher in national rankings and was harder to get into — wouldn’t that make Duke the Harvard of the South? The type of people who used the expression were the same ones who would tell you their SAT and ACT scores unprompted. Who cared? Not the folks who went to Harvard, that’s for sure.
But it spoke to an inferiority complex that had always plagued Vandy. To be known as one of the best southern schools was to exist with that caveat: southern. “They’ve always been ranked highly. It’s not like they came out of nowhere,” Rim told me. “But the location used to be a concern.” Why would someone from New York or California go to school in Tennessee? In 2000, when Brown University’s president Gordon Gee quit to become chancellor of Vanderbilt, the New York Times likened Vanderbilt to a regional state school and marveled at his decision because Brown was “the more prestigious of the two universities.”
“That kind of struck me,” Gee told me. He’s 82 and retired now, but he still remembers how dismissive the Times and his Brown colleagues were of his decision. Vanderbilt was ranked No. 22 by U.S. News & World Report, but the Times wrote about the school as if no one had heard of it. “That article really kind of motivated me to do some things at Vanderbilt,” Gee said. “The aim was to make Vanderbilt a national institution.”
That would cost money, of course. And though all those nice southern boys and girls from well-to-do families often paid full tuition, there weren’t enough of them to fund the kind of institutional overhaul Gee had in mind. Luckily, Vandy had a 21st-century benefactor, Martha Ingram, the chair of the Nashville manufacturing company Ingram Industries. Ingram’s 1998 gift of $300 million of her company’s stock was at the time perhaps the largest private gift ever made to an American university, and over the years, she and other family members added to it considerably.
Gee took steps to strengthen the university’s research capabilities and hire more prominent faculty, but his biggest focus was on students. Namely, getting better ones. “The college rankings are a numbers game,” said Wildavsky. Whose applicants have the highest test scores? Which schools have the highest graduation rate? Whose graduates make the most money? At the time, most Vandy students I knew were the kind of well-rounded kids who got A’s and B’s in their AP classes, played a few sports, belonged to some clubs, were in the National Honor Society, and graduated near the top of their class. But they were hardly inventing Facebook or performing violin solos at Carnegie Hall. To get that kind of student, Vanderbilt first needed to convince them to apply.
The brunt of Vanderbilt’s recruitment strategy was focused on the Northeast, specifically on high schools that sent a lot of students to Ivies. “I’d been visiting those boarding schools when I was at Brown: Andover, Exeter, etc. So I started doing that,” Gee said. He also began “targeting Jewish students,” as he told The Wall Street Journal in 2002, explaining that “Jewish students … make a university a much more habitable place in terms of intellectual life” and were key components of his “elite strategy” of turning Vanderbilt into a direct competitor of the Ivy League.
“People were like, ‘Oh, how can you say that?’ ” Gee laughed at the memory. “I said, ‘Well, that’s what we’re going to do.’ ” The university opened a Jewish student center and kosher restaurant. Over the years, the percentage of Jewish students at Vanderbilt rose from the low single digits to, according to the campus Hillel, about 15 percent.
Not everyone was comfortable going to school in the South. “My grandparents were like, ‘It’s not the same down there. You need to be careful,’ ” Taylor Thompson, who is Black and grew up in Chicago, told me. So Vanderbilt became less southern.
In 2002, the university stripped the word Confederate from the name of one of its dormitories. “We had a growing Black population, and a number of students were uncomfortable staying in the hall, so I said, ‘Okay, let’s rename it,’ ” Gee told me. The decision caused an outcry among a certain type of white southerner — in fact, Gee says he made the name change without consulting the university’s full board of trustees because he believed it would disapprove — that presaged the conservative backlash to the removal of Confederate statutes years later. A Tennessean newspaper columnist all but wondered if Vanderbilt was trying to secede from the South. The United Daughters of the Confederacy, which had originally endowed the dormitory, sued the university to keep Confederate in the name. After it won, Vanderbilt gave the group its money back, all $1.2 million of it, and changed the name anyway.
The year after it renamed the dorm, Vanderbilt created a program called MOSAIC, which invited students of color who had been accepted to the school to come see Vanderbilt in person, to help make the idea of going to a mostly white school in the South a little less scary. “That program was the reason I went to the school,” said Thompson, who graduated in 2021. As with the number of Jewish students, the percentage of Black students at Vanderbilt rose, doubling by the late 2010s.
Then there was the question of what to do about Vanderbilt’s Greek system. In any given year, it wasn’t unusual for a fraternity to get kicked off campus for violating one university policy or another. In the 1990s, Sigma Alpha Epsilon was suspended for (accidentally) setting people on fire, and when I was a freshman, Sigma Chi members reportedly threw mud, rocks, or candy (depending on whom you believed) at the LGBTQ+ student organization’s homecoming float. Kappa Alpha counted Robert E. Lee as its spiritual founder and, of course, had its beloved Confederate cannon. Bid Day, in which female freshmen ran through campus to their new sorority houses, was nicknamed “the Running of the Pigs.”
The fraternities and sororities often defended themselves by pointing out that they had higher GPAs, on average, than the broader Vanderbilt population. Non-Greek students rolled their eyes and pointed to the “test banks,” or copies of exams from previous years, that Greek houses were rumored to possess. Greek life had such a stranglehold on those who were part of it that it bifurcated the student population. You either did the Greek thing at Vanderbilt and made fun of the people who didn’t or you didn’t and made fun of the people who did.
During Gee’s tenure, Vanderbilt moved “Rush” from the fall of freshman year to the spring in an effort to encourage students to make friends on their own. A few years later, the university instituted a residential-college system, sorting new students, Hogwarts style, into houses seemingly modeled on Oxford’s and Yale’s. Over time, the Greek system’s grip on campus culture loosened; today, only about a third of students are in a fraternity or sorority. When I asked current students if they had rushed, most of them responded politely, the way Gavin Schnall, a rising sophomore from the Chicago suburbs, did. “No offense, but I don’t want to get hazed,” Schnall told me. “That sounds miserable.”
When Gee left Vanderbilt in 2007, a longtime law professor and vice-chancellor named Nicholas Zeppos succeeded him and made what in hindsight was the most consequential change to the university since racial integration. Like most private institutions, Vanderbilt was expensive and getting more so with each passing year. This year, the full annual cost of attending the university is nearly $100,000, a figure surpassed by only a handful of schools. But because of Zeppos, the majority of students are not paying that much.
About 17 years ago, Vanderbilt shifted from a financial-aid model that assumed families would take out massive loans to one that aimed to help students graduate without significant debt. Today, Vanderbilt offers free tuition to families whose annual household income is $150,000 or less and charges others on a sliding scale according to their so-called demonstrated need. Vanderbilt also throws all sorts of merit-based scholarships at students to reduce their tuition bills further. Today, only 3 percent of Vandy students take out student loans, down from 27 percent 25 years ago. “UNC–Chapel Hill is my state school, but I would’ve ended up pretty heavily in debt if I’d gone there,” said Jackson Davis, who graduated in 2023. “At Vandy, my student debt is negligible, a few thousand dollars at most.”
These changes happened slowly, and the results weren’t necessarily visible in any one graduating class, but within two decades, Vanderbilt’s student population shifted from one that was more than two-thirds white to just under 40 percent. The percentage of students from the South dropped from nearly half to less than a third. “From when you were there to now, you can see a change in who is in the classroom,” Doug Christiansen, Vanderbilt’s vice-provost for enrollment affairs, told me. Today, students come from all 50 states and 111 countries, and nearly two-thirds of them receive some form of financial aid.
None of these changes were particularly unprecedented; plenty of schools have programs designed to recruit specific types of underrepresented students, for example. What is striking is how effective these seemingly basic efforts have been. That’s because Vanderbilt offered something many of its elite peers didn’t: a sense of fun. In 2024, Vandy beat the University of Alabama in football and an alum won a Nobel Prize in chemistry in the same week. It has managed to become a prestigious oasis for smart students, but without the stress and political intensity for which its Ivy League competitors are almost all known. (An exception is Dartmouth, which has notably tried to evade standoffs with the current White House.) The university was modernizing, but all the charm that made the school so appealing in its southern heyday was still there. “Vanderbilt was what I’d pictured college to look like,” said Leo Chen, who’s 18 and will start college in the fall. “When I visited campus, it was like something out of a movie.”
There was a lightheartedness, even a silliness, to Vanderbilt, and it wasn’t just because of the robber-baron mascot. Despite its rising prominence, the university had so far escaped the kind of intense scrutiny under which a place like Harvard or Columbia operated. Students felt safe and protected. They even had a term for this, often talking about living within the “Vandy bubble.” One year, a group of students sneaked an enormous Santa hat on top of Vanderbilt’s main flagpole; the university had to rent a cherry picker to get it down. Another year, a student-run, Onion-esque newspaper printed a fake version of the real campus newspaper with the headline “Gee Dead” — a joke that tricked so many people on campus that Gee had to pose with a copy of the issue to prove he was still alive. When the Princeton Review ranked Vanderbilt students as the “happiest” in the country in 2014, then again in 2015 and 2017, I wasn’t in the least surprised.
Nor was I surprised that the number of applications to the university had more than quadrupled and that by the early 2020s, the type of student who attended Vanderbilt was academically indistinguishable from someone who got into an Ivy. This new student was considerably more career focused (“I’ve never met more 18-year-olds who want to go work for McKinsey in my life,” Sam Sliman, who graduated in 2024, told me) and politically engaged than earlier generations, though that may be a result less of demographic changes and more of the fact that Donald Trump had either been the president or a candidate for half of a 20-year-old’s life. One student enthusiastically told me about getting a group together to attend a “No Kings” rally. After the Covenant School shooting in 2023, Vanderbilt students marched on the Tennessee State Capitol to advocate for stricter gun-control laws. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, a movement called Abolish Greek Life took hold on college campuses across the country — a campaign that originated at Vanderbilt.
It was started by a group of Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority members who had been so frustrated by the racism and misogyny they witnessed within Vanderbilt’s Greek system that they posted about it on Instagram, calling out Greek houses by name and getting specific with their recollections. Soon, other students and alumni submitted their own horror stories. There were anonymous rape allegations, the Battle of Gettysburg reenacted through a game of beer pong, stories about a Mexicans–and–Border Patrol party. A video with a white fraternity member shouting the N-word circulated on social media. On the Vanderbilt page of the web forum Greekrank, Thompson recalled, anonymous users threatened the Abolish Greek Life founders, many of whom were Black women, saying they needed to be reenslaved and whipped. “It was vile, crazy stuff,” said Thompson, who was the target of several posts. More than 200 students quit their fraternities and sororities. The campus newspaper ran columns calling for the university to either reform the Greek system or abolish it entirely. KA, I learned, even promised to move its cannon.
This was the Vanderbilt that Daniel Diermeier took over when he became chancellor in 2020: a school that was increasingly known, increasingly hard to get into, but also increasingly at odds with itself. Before he became a college administrator, Diermeier studied political science and taught business management. He wrote books about how companies and institutions manage and safeguard their reputations, and he saw an opportunity at Vanderbilt. “When you say, ‘We’re going to be a national university,’ now your identity is up for grabs,” Diermeier told me. “You have to know who you are.”
Diermeier came to Vanderbilt from the University of Chicago, where as provost he had heralded the university’s long-held commitment to free speech. He carried that value with him to Vanderbilt, announcing a policy of “institutional neutrality,” or the idea that unless an issue directly affected the university’s ability to operate, it would take no official stance.
Other than a few anodyne public statements, Diermeier and the university took a relatively hands-off approach to Abolish Greek Life, although students told me it did crack down on instances of underage drinking and hazing. When Vanderbilt’s student newspaper asked Diermeier why the university had remained quiet, he explained that “students … should debate and they should work through these things on their own.”
With this newfound impartiality, the university allowed a conservative student group to host a speaker who praised settler colonialism and approved the registration of a new student group, a campus chapter of the Young Democratic Socialists of America. But the limits of Diermeier’s neutrality were tested in 2024, when Vanderbilt students, like those at many campuses across the country, enraged by the destruction of Gaza, tried to force their schools to financially divest from anything related to Israel. Compared with the scene at places like Columbia University, Vanderbilt’s protests were relatively small and uneventful with one exception: In March 2024, 27 students entered Kirkland Hall, where Diermeier’s office was located, and staged a 21-hour sit-in that had to be dispersed by Nashville police. Vanderbilt expelled three students, suspended one, and disciplined the rest. Diermeier then wrote an editorial for The Wall Street Journal, explaining that while Vandy students were free to voice their opinions, the university would draw the line at occupying buildings. “Free expression is alive and well at Vanderbilt,” he wrote.
“That put me and the university onstage,” Diermeier told me. “I thought it would be my 15 minutes of fame, but it hasn’t let up.” With this idea of institutional neutrality, Diermeier had rebranded Vanderbilt as the Switzerland of universities. In his editorial, he made it clear that students were allowed to protest in favor of divestment but that the university would never comply, not because it was choosing a side but because a 2022 Tennessee law prohibited companies that do business with the state of Tennessee from boycotting Israel. Protest all you want, Diermeier said, but Vanderbilt would follow the law. The legislation had essentially given the university a convenient out; it could quash campus protests without appearing to infringe on free speech or facing backlash.
NPR and PBS interviewed him. The American Enterprise Institute announced “Why Vanderbilt Is Getting Jewish Life Right and Others Aren’t.” Christopher Rim, the college-admissions adviser, said Vanderbilt’s handling of campus protests made it very popular among both his Jewish clients and his more conservative ones who worried the Ivies had become too radical.
Christiansen is more cautious when he discusses the impact. He has seen a rise in applications since Diermeier’s media blitz — more than 54,000 people applied last year, vying for just 1,600 spots — but applications had been rising so consistently, and for so long, that it was hard to know definitively how much of an effect it really had. “Anecdotally, there’s no question,” he told me. “I think over time we’ll have more data on what really happened.”
Vanderbilt’s existing students seem ambivalent about their school’s new image. A few of them told me they liked or even admired the idea of institutional neutrality — “I’m a big Danny D. fan, as I call him,” said Matt DeAnzeris, a rising senior — but most said they didn’t think Vanderbilt was being very neutral. A recent academic report, commissioned by Diermeier and the chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis (another university rising in the rankings), fretted about the humanities sometimes openly embracing the ideals of “the progressive left” at the expense of scholarly understanding. That didn’t sound very neutral. Several students said Vanderbilt had cracked down much harder on protests than Diermeier’s Journal op-ed let on. “They kept coming up with new ‘rules’ for what was an approved form of protest, which is ludicrous,” said Sliman, who was president of the student government at the time. After the Kirkland sit-in, more than 120 Vanderbilt faculty members signed an open letter to the university administration, listing bureaucratic barriers the school had used to curb protests, from marking sections of the campus as protest-free zones to canceling a permit to display pro-Palestinian artwork and “confin[ing] student expression to a dwindling number of bulletin boards, locations, and approved time slots.”
“And what about that compact with the Trump administration?” a rising sophomore named Sophia pointed out. She was referring to a letter the Trump administration sent to nine universities last year, including Vanderbilt, linking federal funding to a list of demands, including limiting the number of international students they admitted and offering free tuition to anyone who studied a “hard science.” None of the schools agreed to it, but Vanderbilt was one of only two that didn’t publicly reject it as well. “I can see how not saying anything is trying to be neutral, but I worry it was just appeasement,” Sophia said.
As at many universities, the percentage of Black students admitted to Vanderbilt plummeted after the Supreme Court outlawed the consideration of race in college admissions. And yet last year, instead of increasing support for the students of color who did get admitted, the university ended its 22-year-old MOSAIC program, citing the Trump administration’s anti-DEI policies. But unlike Tennessee’s law against boycotting Israel, the specific policy Vanderbilt cited was just a list of “nonbinding suggestions” from then–Attorney General Pam Bondi. Thompson told me, “I can’t imagine Vandy removing the word Confederate from a dorm today. That would require the school to take a stand on something.”
One thing Diermeier is not neutral about is his desire to continue raising Vanderbilt’s profile. Its $10.9 billion endowment is currently one of the largest in the country. Vanderbilt does not disclose all of its investment portfolio, so it’s hard to tell how it has managed its money, but by all accounts, it seems to be doing just fine. Under his leadership, the university announced that it would invest $300 million in athletics, redesigned its logo, and committed to opening four additional campuses that would extend the university’s reach beyond Nashville. Last year, it finalized a 99-year $44.3 million lease with New York’s General Theological Seminary, the Episcopal Church’s oldest institution of this type, taking over its campus in Chelsea. A Catholic choral school had originally planned to occupy the seminary, but a Vanderbilt alumna who lived nearby was alarmed by the idea of a Catholic institution setting up shop in the heart of one of Manhattan’s most gay-friendly neighborhoods. She got in touch with Diermeier and the head of Vanderbilt’s board of trustees and suggested the university take it over instead. “They mobilized quickly, saw the property, created a business plan,” said James Kellerhouse, Vanderbilt’s assistant vice-chancellor who’s heading up its New York campus. “It was, like, five days.”
To expand its presence in the tech scene, Vanderbilt also purchased the campus currently occupied by California College of the Arts, a private art school in San Francisco that was running out of money. A third campus was planned for West Palm Beach (it’s for people who want to go into finance or aerospace) and a fourth in Chattanooga, Tennessee, not because anyone wants to live in Chattanooga but because it’s the site of the first commercial quantum-computing center in the country.
These new campuses are an attempt to solve the university’s geographical problem: Nashville is far from the country’s business and tech hubs, which has made it a hard sell for the alarmingly driven 18-year-olds it now attracts.
“You worry about things like, Will I not be employable if I get a computer-science degree from a school that’s not plugged into that scene? Is it okay to be all the way in Tennessee? ” said Bryce Hanson, who graduated in 2024 and now works at Capital One. But if Vanderbilt relocated these students — for a semester in New York or maybe longer in San Francisco — and hooked them up with internships, then they’d essentially start their careers before they graduated. This year, students at the Chelsea campus will study the history of New York City (there are classes on immigration, museum studies, city infrastructure, and public health) and intern at local institutions like the Whitney Museum and Goldman Sachs. “Honestly, I wish they’d started it before I graduated,” Hanson said.
When I visited Vanderbilt’s Chelsea campus in June, students weren’t there yet and the place was still under construction. The seminary dates back to 1817 and was built on land donated by Clement Clarke Moore (of “ ’Twas the Night Before Christmas” fame) — “He gave them 66 tracts of his apple orchard, whatever that means,” said Kellerhouse — but it had suffered from declining enrollment and moved many of its classes online years ago, leaving some of its buildings to fall into disrepair. Vanderbilt had lucked into the college-campus equivalent of a classic New York real-estate opportunity: a beautiful historic gem in a coveted Manhattan neighborhood that requires a full renovation before anyone can move in. Walkways had to be leveled. Buildings needed to be made accessible for students with disabilities. “We’re talking really sexy things like stormwater drainage,” Kellerhouse said. By the time the 90 students who will make up Vanderbilt’s first New York class arrive in late August, only two of the campus’s seven dormitories will be ready for them.
But the potential is there. Many of the seminary’s buildings date back to the late-19th century, around the time Vanderbilt’s Nashville campus was built. The charming grass lawns resemble smaller versions of the ones back in Tennessee, and the original refectory, with exposed wooden beams, looks suspiciously like the original dining hall at, well, Harvard. There is nothing southern about the place. After all these years, the university has finally become what it has always wanted: the Vanderbilt of the North. I’m just glad KA moved its cannon.
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