Vanderbilt University (informally Vandy or VU) is a private research university in Nashville, Tennessee, United States. Founded in 1873, it was named in honor of shipping and railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, who provided the school with its initial $1million endowment in the hopes that his gift, and the greater work of the university, would help to heal the sectional wounds inflicted by the American Civil War. Vanderbilt is a founding member of the Southeastern Conference and has been the conference's only private school since 1966.
The university comprises eleven schools and enrolls nearly 13,800 students from the US and 70 foreign countries. Vanderbilt is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity". Several research centers and institutes are affiliated with the university, including the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center, and Dyer Observatory. Vanderbilt University Medical Center, formerly part of the university, became a separate institution in 2016. In 2025-2026, Vanderbilt opened campuses in New York City, San Francisco, and West Palm Beach.
Vanderbilt alumni, faculty, and staff have included 9 Nobel Prize winners, 1 Dan David Prize winner, 2 vice presidents of the United States, 13 governors, 2 US Supreme Court justices, 54 current and former members of the United States Congress, and 18 US ambassadors. Other notable alumni include 3 Pulitzer Prize winners, 27 Rhodes Scholars, 2 Academy Award winners, 1 Grammy Award winner, 6 MacArthur Fellows, 4 foreign heads of state, and 5 Olympic medalists. Vanderbilt has more than 145,000 alumni, with 40 alumni clubs established worldwide.
History
Founding and early years
In the years before the American Civil War of 1861–1865, the Methodist Episcopal Church South had been considering the creation of a regional university for the training of ministers in a location central to its congregations. Following lobbying by Nashville bishop Holland Nimmons McTyeire, church leaders voted to found "The Central University of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South" in Nashville in 1872. However, lack of funds and the ravaged state of the Reconstruction Era South delayed the opening of the college.
The following year, McTyeire stayed at the New York City residence of Cornelius Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt's second wife, Frank Armstrong Crawford Vanderbilt (1839–1885), was a cousin of McTyeire's wife, Amelia Townsend McTyeire (1827–1891), and both women were from Mobile, Alabama. Cornelius Vanderbilt, the wealthiest man in the United States at the time, had been planning to establish a university on Staten Island, New York. However, McTyeire convinced him to donate $500,000 to endow Central University in order to "contribute to strengthening the ties which should exist between all sections of our common country".
Vanderbilt eventually increased the endowment to $1 million (roughly $ million in ), and though he never expressed any desire that the university be named after him, McTyeire and his fellow trustees rechristened the school in the Spring of 1873 in his honor. They acquired land from Confederate Congressman Henry S. Foote, who had built Old Central, a house still standing on campus.
The first building, Main Building, later known as Kirkland Hall, was designed by William Crawford Smith, and its construction began in 1874. In the fall of 1875, about 200 students enrolled at Vanderbilt, and in October the university was dedicated. Bishop McTyeire was named chairman of the Board of Trust for life by Vanderbilt as a stipulation of his endowment. McTyeire named Landon Garland (1810–1895), his mentor from Randolph-Macon College, as chancellor. Garland shaped the school's structure and hired the school's faculty. Most of this faculty left after disputes with Bishop McTyeire, including over pay rates. When the first fraternity chapter, Phi Delta Theta, was established on campus in 1876, it was shut down by the faculty, only to be reestablished as a secret society in 1877. In 1880, Old Gym, a Victorian building designed by Peter J. Williamson, was completed and became the university's first gymnasium. By 1883, the Board of Trust passed a resolution allowing fraternities on campus, and more chapters were established in 1884.
Following the Tennessee Centennial and International Exposition, a statue of Cornelius Vanderbilt, designed by Italian sculptor Giuseppe Moretti, was moved from the grounds of the Parthenon to the Vanderbilt campus.
In 1905, Main Building (Kirkland Hall), which originally had two Victorian towers, burnt down and was rebuilt in an Italianate design with a single 170-foot tower after the university received donations totaling over $50,000. There is speculation that the school initially intended to rebuild both towers of the original Kirkland Hall but lacked the funds to do so.
Connections to slavery Many of the university's early leaders had prominent ties to slavery and the Confederacy before the Civil War. Frank Vanderbilt was "a Confederate sympathizer" during the Civil War. McTyeire was born into a slave-owning family and authored an essay in favor of slavery. Garland owned "up to 60 slaves" before the Civil War.
One of the founding trustees, Hezekiah William Foote, was a Confederate veteran and the owner of four plantations in Mississippi, including Mount Holly. The Treasurer of the Board of Trust from 1872 to 1875, Alexander Little Page Green, whose portrait hangs in Kirkland Hall, was a Methodist preacher and a former slave owner. His son-in-law, Robert A. Young, was a Methodist minister who served as the Financial Secretary on the Board of Trust from 1874 to 1882, retiring from the board in 1902. The Elliston family, who owned slaves, donated some of their Burlington Plantation, in one of the first expansions of the campus.
Split with the Methodist Church During the first 40 years, the Board of Trust, and therefore the university, was under the control of the General Conference (the governing body) of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Tension grew 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, and the extent that non-Methodists could teach at the school.
Conflicts escalated after James H. Kirkland was appointed chancellor in 1893. Then the Southern Methodist Church congregations raised just $50,000 in a campaign to raise $300,000.
Meanwhile, the Board of Trust voted to limit Methodist representation on the board to just five bishops. Former faculty member and bishop Elijah Hoss led a group attempting to assert Methodist control. In 1910, the board refused to seat three Methodist bishops. The Methodist Church took the issue to court and won at the local level. On March 21, 1914, the Tennessee Supreme Court ruled that the Commodore, and not the Methodist Church, was the university's founder and that the board could therefore seat whomever it wished. The General Conference in 1914 voted 151 to 140 to sever its ties with Vanderbilt; it also voted to establish a new university, Southern Methodist University, and to greatly expand Emory University.
Colonel Edmund William Cole, the treasurer of the Board of Trust, was a Confederate veteran and a railroad executive. He is the namesake of the annual Cole Lecture; his marble bust and his wife's portrait can be seen in Kirkland Hall. His son, Whitefoord Russell Cole, who was the chairman of the Board of Trust from 1915 to 1934, defended Chancellor Kirkland's decision to split with the Methodist Church. He is the namesake of Cole Hall, completed in 1949.
1920s through World War II
In the 1920s and 1930s, Vanderbilt University hosted two partly overlapping groups of scholars who had a large impact on American thought and letters: the Fugitives and the Agrarians. Meanwhile, Frank C. Rand, who served as the President and later Chairman of the International Shoe Company, donated US$150,000 to the university in 1925; Rand Hall was subsequently named for him.
In 1928, the construction of three more buildings was completed: Garland Hall, named for Chancellor Landon Garland; Buttrick Hall, named for Wallace Buttrick of the General Education Board; and Calhoun Hall, named for William Henry Calhoun, a silversmith and Odd Fellows Grand Master.
In 1933, the United Daughters of the Confederacy donated $50,000 (roughly $925,166 in 2015 dollars) for the construction of Confederate Memorial Hall, designed by architect Henry C. Hibbs. It was completed in 1935.
In the 1930s, Ernest William Goodpasture and his colleagues in the School of Medicine invented methods for cultivating viruses and rickettsiae in fertilized chicken eggs."Obituary (AP): Dr. Ernest Goodpasture Dead; Developed Vaccine for Mumps: Pathologist's Chicken Embryo Virus Led to Immunization Against Many Diseases". New York Times; September 22, 1960; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: pg. 27. 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. Alfred Blalock, Professor of Surgery, and his assistant Vivien Thomas identified a decrease in blood volume and fluid loss outside the vascular bed as a key factor in traumatic shock and pioneered the use of replacement fluids for its treatment.McCabe, Katie "Like Something the Lord Made." The Washingtonian, 1999. This treatment saved countless lives in World War II, during which Vanderbilt was one of 131 colleges and universities nationally that took part in the V-12 Navy College Training Program which offered students a path to a Navy commission.
German biophysicist Max Delbrück joined the Department of Physics in 1940, and in the following year, he met Italian microbiologist Salvador Luria. In 1942, they published on bacterial resistance to virus infection mediated by random mutation. The culminating Luria–Delbrück experiment, also called the Fluctuation Test, demonstrated that Darwin's theory of natural selection acting on random mutations applies to bacteria as well as to more complex organisms. The 1969 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to both scientists.
Radioactivity experiments Shortly after the war, from 1945 to 1947, researchers at Vanderbilt University conducted an experiment funded by the Rockefeller Foundation where they gave 800 pregnant women radioactive ironPacchioli, David, (March 1996) "Subjected to Science" , Research/Penn State, Vol. 17, no. 1 without their consent, being told that they were receiving "vitamin drinks" that would improve the health of babies. Four of the women's babies died from cancer as result of the experiment, and the women suffered from rashes, bruises, hair/tooth loss, anemia, and cancer. In a lawsuit the women received $9.1 million from Vanderbilt University and $900,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1998.
1950s and 1960s