Vanderbilt University
From The UCSC Wikipedia Trust Project
Vanderbilt University is a private, nonsectarian, coeducational research university in Nashville, Tennessee.
Vanderbilt was founded in 1873 with a gift of $1 million by shipping and rail magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt who, despite having never been to the South, hoped his gift and the greater work of the university would help to heal the sectional wounds inflicted by the Civil War.
Today, Vanderbilt enrolls around 11,000 students in ten schools—four undergraduate and six graduate and professional. Also affiliated with the university are several research facilities and a world-renowned medical center, the Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC), which is the only Level I Trauma Center in Middle Tennessee.
Vanderbilt is a member of the Association of American Universities, to whose membership it was elected in 1950.
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History
In the years prior to the American Civil War, the Methodist Episcopal Church, South had been considering creating a regional university for the training of ministers located centrally for the congregations of the church. Through the lobbying of Nashville bishop Holland McTyeire, church leaders voted in 1872 to create "Central University" in Nashville. However, lack of funds (and the war-ravaged state of the South) delayed the opening of the college.
The following year, on a medical trip to New York, McTyeire stayed at the residence of "Commodore" Cornelius Vanderbilt, whose second wife was the cousin of McTyeire's wife. Vanderbilt, the wealthiest man in America at the time, had been considering philanthropy causes as he was at an advanced age. His original plan was to establish a university on Staten Island, New York in honor of his mother. However, McTyeire successfully convinced him to donate $500,000 to endow Central University.
The endowment (later increased to $1 million) would be Vanderbilt's only philanthropy. Though the Commodore never expressed any desire to have the university named after himself, McTyeire and his fellow trustees soon rechristened the school as "the Vanderbilt University." Vanderbilt died in 1877 having never even visited the school named after him.
In the fall of 1875, about 200 students enrolled at Vanderbilt; the university was dedicated in October of that year. Bishop McTyeire, who had been named chairman of the Board of Trust for life by Vanderbilt as a stipulation of his endowment, named Landon Garland, his mentor from Randolph-Macon College in Virginia and then-Chancellor of the University of Mississippi, as chancellor. Garland shaped the school's structure and hired the school's faculty, many of whom were renowned scholars in their respective fields. However, most of this crop of star faculty left after disputes with Bishop McTyeire.
For the first 40 years, the Board of Trust (and therefore the university itself) was under the control of the general conference (the governing body) of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. However, tensions began rising between the university administration and the Conference over the future of the school, particularly over the methods by which members of the Vanderbilt Board of Trust would be chosen.
Conflicts escalated with the appointment of James Kirkland as chancellor in 1893. The final straw, at least in the mind of Kirkland, was a failed campaign to raise $300,000 from Southern Methodist congregations (only $50,000 was raised). Further disputes between the bishops and Kirkland, which erupted into litigation in 1912, led the Methodist conference to sever all ties with Vanderbilt University in June 1914.
Vanderbilt enjoyed early intellectual influence during the 1920s and 1930s when it hosted two partly overlapping groups of scholars who had a large impact on American thought and letters: the Fugitives and the Agrarians. During the same period, Ernest William Goodpasture and his colleagues in the Medical School invented methods for cultivating viruses and rickettsiae in fertilized chicken eggs. This work made possible the production of vaccines against chicken pox, smallpox, yellow fever, typhus, Rocky mountain spotted fever and other diseases caused by agents that only propagate in living cells.
In the late 1950s, the Vanderbilt Divinity School became something of a hotbed of the emerging Civil Rights movement, and the university expelled one of its leaders, James Lawson. Much later, in 2005, he was made a Distinguished Alumnus for his achievements and re-hired as a Distinguished University Professor for the 2006-07 academic year.[1]
As with Lawson, the university drew national attention in 1966, when it recruited the first African American athlete in the Southeastern Conference, Perry Wallace. Wallace, from Nashville, played varsity basketball for Vanderbilt from 1967-1970, and faced considerable opposition from segregationists when playing at other SEC venues. In 2004, a student-led drive to have Wallace's jersey retired finally succeeded. Harold Vanderbilt was president of the Board of Trust between 1955 and 1968 when racial integration was a very prominent topic at the school. Today a statue of him in front of Buttrick Hall memorializes his efforts.
In 1966, Oberlin Graduate School of Theology moved from Ohio to Nashville, in order to merge with the Vanderbilt Divinity School. In 1979, Vanderbilt absorbed its neighbor Peabody College.
History, race, and civil rights issues again came to the fore on the campus in 2002, when the university decided to rename a dormitory on the Peabody campus, Confederate Memorial Hall, to Memorial Hall. Nationwide attention resulted, in part due to a lawsuit by the Tennessee chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, who had helped pay for the building's construction in 1933 with a $50,000 contribution.
The Davidson County Chancery Court dismissed the lawsuit in 2003, but the Tennessee Court of Appeals ruled in May 2005 that the university would have to pay damages based on the present value of the United Daughters of the Confederacy's contribution if an inscription bearing the name "Confederate Memorial Hall" were to be removed from the building or altered.
In late July of 2005, the university announced that although it has officially renamed the building and all university publications and offices will refer to it solely as "Memorial Hall," the university would neither appeal the matter further nor remove the inscription and pay damages.
Organization
Board of Trust
Vanderbilt University, as a private corporation, is wholly governed by an independent, self-perpetuating Board of Trust. The Board is comprised of 45 regular members (plus any number of trustees emeriti) and the Chancellor. Each trustee serves a five-year term (except for four recently-graduated undergraduates, whom serve four-year terms). A complete, up-to-date listing of the members of the Board of Trust can be found here. Martha Rivers Ingram is the current Chairman of the Board of Trust.
Chancellor
Gordon Gee is the current Chancellor of Vanderbilt University. Appointed by the Board of Trust, he is the chief executive officer of the university, and serves only at the pleasure of the Board. Prior to his appointment in February 2000, Gee served as president of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.
Since the opening of the university in 1875, only seven individuals have served as chancellor[2]:
| Chancellor | Tenure | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Landon Garland | 1875–1893 | Organized structure of university, hired the first faculty. |
| James Kirkland | 1893–1937 | Longest tenure; severed ties with Methodist church; relocated the medical school to the main campus. |
| Oliver Carmichael | 1937–1946 | Encouraged research, developed the graduate school, established the Joint University Libraries for Vanderbilt, Peabody and Scarritt College. |
| Harvie Branscomb | 1946–1962 | Presided over a period of major growth and improvements, including opening admissions to all races. |
| Alexander Heard | 1963–1982 | Founded the Owen School of Management and negotiated the merger with Peabody College. |
| Joe B. Wyatt | 1982–2000 | Raised endowment; encouraged student volunteerism; recruited more diverse student body and renovated many old buildings. |
| Gordon Gee | 2000– |
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Gee also serves on the Board of Trustees of several companies, including Massey Energy and Gaylord Entertainment Company.
Academic divisions
Vanderbilt University is currently divided into ten degree-granting units. Each division except the Graduate School is headed by a dean. The divisions of the university and their current heads are: Template:Clear
| Academic Division | Dean |
|---|---|
| College of Arts and Science | Richard McCarty |
| Blair School of Music | Mark Wait |
| School of Engineering | Kenneth F. Galloway |
| Peabody College of Education and Human Development | Camilla Benbow |
| Graduate School | Dennis Hall [1] |
| Divinity School | James Hudnut-Beumler |
| Law School | Edward L. Rubin |
| School of Medicine | Steven G. Gabbe |
| School of Nursing | Colleen Conway-Welch |
| Owen Graduate School Of Management | Jim Bradford |
Students and faculty
As of fall 2005, the last semester for which comprehensive data have been published, the university had an enrollment of 6,402 undergraduate and 5,079 graduate and professional students. Approximately 55% of the total student body comes from outside the Southeast, including some 8.5% from outside the United States. Moreover, 22.7% of the undergraduate class of 2009 were non-Caucasian.
With nearly 20,000 employees, Vanderbilt is the largest private employer in Middle Tennessee and the second largest in the state (after FedEx, headquartered in Memphis, Tennessee). The vast majority of those employees are staff at the Medical Center (see below). Of the 2,527 full-time faculty employed by the university, 1,625 are Medical Center faculty (specifically the Schools of Medicine and Nursing) and 902 are University Central (non-Medical Center) faculty.
In 2004, the university reported that 24.1% of University Central faculty were women, while 14.4% were of a racial or ethnic minority. In 2003, seventeen were members of one of the National Academies.
Campus
The Vanderbilt campus is located approximately 1.5 miles (2.4 km) west of downtown in the West End neighborhood of midtown Nashville. It has an area of 330 acres (1.3 km²), though this figure includes large tracts of sparsely used land in the southwest part of the main campus, as well as the Medical Center. The original academic quad is approximately 30 acres (12 ha) in area. Vanderbilt is located at Template:Coor dms. (Click here to see a campus map.)
Layout
The Vanderbilt campus is roughly fan-shaped (with the point at the corner of West End and 21st Avenues) and divisible into six sections, all of which are within walking distance from one another: the furthest distance on campus take about twenty-five minutes to walk.
Original campus
In the northeast corner of the campus (the "base" of the fan) is the original campus. The first college buildings, including Kirkland Hall, were erected here in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. This section stretches from West End Avenue south to the Stevenson Center and west from 21st Avenue to Alumni Lawn.
The majority of the buildings of the arts and humanities departments of the College of Arts and Science, as well as the facilities of the Law School, Owen, and the Divinity School, are located in the original campus. Additionally, the Jean and Alexander Heard Memorial Library (known to alumni as the JUL, or Joint University Library) and Sarratt Student Center/Rand Hall can be found on the original campus.
Stevenson Center
Flanking the original campus to the south are the Stevenson Center for Science and Mathematics and the School of Engineering complex (Jacobs Hall-Featheringill Hall). Housing the Science Library, the School of Engineering, and all the science and math departments of the College of Arts and Science, save for psychology, this complex sits between the original campus and the Medical Center.
Medical center campus
The Vanderbilt University Medical Center itself takes up the southeastern part of the campus. Besides the various associated hospitals and clinics and the facilities of the Schools of Medicine and Nursing, the medical center also houses many major research facilities.
Peabody campus
Directly across 21st Avenue from the Medical Center sits the campus of the Peabody College of Education and Human Development. Due to their separate histories until the merger, the Peabody campus was configured in a radically different style than the original Vanderbilt campus. Whereas the latter has an unplanned organic design with buildings scattered throughout, Peabody campus was planned as a geometric design, similar to the Jeffersonian style of the University of Virginia. The campus is home to not only Peabody College but also the future Commons, where all freshmen will live together as part of the College Halls plan (see College Halls, below).
Central campus and Greek row
West of the original campus and the Medical Center, Greek Row and the bulk of Vanderbilt residence halls are found. From north to south, Carmichael Towers, Greek Row, Branscomb Quadrangle, and Highland Quadrangle house the vast majority of on-campus residents in facilities ranging from the double-occupancy shared-bathroom dorms in Branscomb and Towers to the apartments and lodges in Highland Quad.
This part of campus is newer than the others; Vanderbilt's westward growth did not start until the 1950s. This portion of campus was built by tearing down small single family houses and duplexes dating from the early 20th century, and so the area has significantly less green space than the arboretum on the original campus and is more indicative of the university's urban locale.
Athletics and recreation facilities
Memorial Gymnasium, Vanderbilt Stadium, Hawkins Field, McGugin Center, and all the other varsity athletic fields and facilities are to be found in the extreme west of campus. The Student Recreation Center, and its associated intramural fields, are located south of the varsity facilties
Arboretum
The oldest part of the Vanderbilt campus is known for its abundance of trees and green space, which stand in contrast to the surrounding cityscape of urban Nashville. At least one specimen of every tree that is indigenous to the state of Tennessee grows on campus.
One tree, the Bicentennial Oak between Rand Hall and Garland Hall, is certified to have lived during the American Revolution and is the oldest thing on the campus.
The main (original) campus was designated by the Association of Botanical Gardens and Aboreta as a national arboretum in 1988, a status that the university does not take lightly. One interesting consequence of this designation that any visitor to the campus will quickly notice is the length to which trees on campus are protected. Signs posted on the trees by various student groups are actually bound to the trees with wire instead of being nailed to the tree, as it is unlawful to cause damage to any tree in a national arboretum.
Student life
Organizations
The university recognizes nearly 400 student organizations, ranging from academic major societies and honoraries to recreational sports clubs, the oldest of which is the Vanderbilt Sailing Club.
There are religious groups like the Baptist Collegiate Ministries, Hillel, the Reform University Fellowship, the Campus Crusade for Christ, and the Wesleyan/Canterbury Fellowship.
The campus radio station, WRVU, represents the student body by playing a range of music from bluegrass to choral.
There are also more than thirty service organizations on campus, giving students the opportunity to perform community service across the country and around the world, including the Vanderbilt-founded Alternative Spring Break.
Greek Life
As of spring 2004, 45% of the undergraduate student body was affiliated with one of 34 social Greek organizations. Specifically, 34% of men were members of fraternities and 55% of women were members of sororities. More recently, several new chapters have been colonized at Vanderbilt, demonstrating the continued demand for available memberships.
The local chapters are supported by active alumni bases that continue to involve former active members in both the life of the social organization and the life of the university. Many members of Vanderbilt's Board of Trust were members of Greek organizations. Template:Clear
Fraternities
National fraternities recognized by the Office of the Dean of Students include:
| Delta Kappa Epsilon, 1847 | Sigma Alpha Epsilon, 1857 | Kappa Sigma, 1877 |
| Beta Theta Pi, 1884 | Alpha Tau Omega, 1889 | Sigma Chi, 1891 |
| Pi Kappa Alpha, 1893 | Kappa Alpha Order, 189-? | Phi Kappa Psi, 1901 |
| Phi Kappa Sigma, 1902 | Zeta Beta Tau, 1918 | Lambda Chi Alpha, 1922 |
| Alpha Epsilon Pi, 1929 | Alpha Phi Omega[2], 196-? | Omega Psi Phi*, 1971 |
| Alpha Phi Alpha*, 1975 | Kappa Alpha Psi*, 1989 | Phi Beta Sigma*, 1994 |
| Lambda Theta Phi**, 2000 | Beta Upsilon Chi[3], 2003 | Beta Chi Theta, 2005 |
| Sigma Phi Epsilon, 2005 | Sigma Nu | Phi Delta Theta |
In addition to the officially recognized fraternities and sororities, the Nu Society (an off-campus organization established by former members of Vanderbilt's chapter of Sigma Nu after that chapter lost its charter) maintains an active off-campus presence. In addition, an independent fraternity, PSK (Pages, Squires, Knights), existed between 1965 and 1975.[3]
Sororities
The sororities represented on campus are:
| Kappa Alpha Theta, 1904 | Delta Delta Delta, 1911 |
| Alpha Omicron Pi, 1917 | Pi Beta Phi, 1940 |
| Kappa Delta, 1949 | Chi Omega, 1954 |
| Alpha Kappa Alpha*, 1972 | Delta Sigma Theta*, 1975 |
| Alpha Delta Pi, 1978 | Kappa Kappa Gamma, 1978 |
| Alpha Chi Omega, 1982 | Delta Gamma 2000 |
| Zeta Phi Beta*, 2000 | Lambda Theta Alpha**, 2001 |
Honor Code
Since the first classes began at Vanderbilt, the Honor System has served to strengthen the academic integrity of the university. Its principles were outlined in a famous quote by long-time Dean of Students Madison Sarratt:
:Today I am going to give you two examinations, one in trigonometry and one in honesty. I hope you will pass them both, but if you must fail one, let it be trigonometry, for there are many good [people] in this world today who cannot pass an examination in trigonometry, but there are no good [people] in the world who cannot pass an examination in honesty.
As a part of their first act together as a class, each Vanderbilt class meets together at the Honor Code Signing Ceremony, where every member of the class pledges their honor and signs the code. The signature pages are then hung in the Student Center. The ceremony is one of only two occasions where a class will be congregated in a single place at the same time (the other being Commencement).
The Undergraduate Honor Council was formed to help enforce and protect the tradition of the Honor Code. Today, the Honor Council serves two simultaneous aims: to enforce and protect the Honor Code and to inform members of the Vanderbilt community about the Honor System.
Student housing
All undergraduate students not living with relatives in Davidson County are required to live on campus all four years to the extent that on-campus student housing facilities can accommodate them.
Therefore, in reality, approximately 80% of undergraduates—freshmen, sophomores, nearly all juniors and most seniors—live on campus. The remaining undergraduates join graduate and professional students in living off-campus. Student life at Vanderbilt is consequently heavily intertwined with campus life. However, with an additional 900 beds being created with the opening of the Commons in 2008 (see below), very few undergraduates will be granted permission to live off-campus.
The on-campus residential system is currently undergoing a radical change. The new system, announced by the administration in 2002, would change the current structure of quadrangle-based residence halls to a new system of residential colleges, to be called College Halls. Similar to the residential structures at Yale, Rice, Caltech, and Harvard, the new College Halls system would create residence halls where students and faculty would live together in a self-sustaining environment for growth with study rooms, cafeterias, laundry facilities, and stores.
The change is being made in the hope of fostering a better learning atmosphere for students living on campus, as well as making students less reliant on Greek life for social status. While there will still be Greek organizations, the College Halls system will establish additional social structures for those students who chose not to join a fraternity or sorority. Many students who are members of Greek organizations worry about the effect that the College Hall system will have on their organizations, but the administration has assured them that Vanderbilt remains committed to Greek life.
This project is well underway and is scheduled to be completed within the next twenty years. The first step in the College Halls system will be The Commons, a collection of ten residential halls on the Peabody campus that will house all first-year students beginning in the fall of 2008.
While the university currently houses freshmen in three separate and very distinct residential areas, it is hoped that The Commons will give first-year students a unified (and unifying) living-learning experience. In order to accommodate these ten residential halls, the university is in the process of renovating five existing Peabody dormitories and building five new ones.
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