![]() Many of the university's early leaders had prominent ties to slavery and the Confederacy before the Civil War. By 1883, the Board of Trust passed a resolution allowing fraternities on campus, and more chapters were established in 1884. 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. However, most of this faculty left after disputes with Bishop McTyeire, including over pay rates. As chancellor, he shaped the school's structure and hired the school's faculty, many of whom were renowned scholars in their respective fields. McTyeire named Landon Garland (1810–1895), his mentor from Randolph-Macon College in Virginia and then- Chancellor of the University of Mississippi, as chancellor. Bishop McTyeire was named chairman of the Board of Trust for life by Vanderbilt as a stipulation of his endowment. In the fall of 1875, about 200 students enrolled at Vanderbilt, and in October the university was dedicated. The first building, Main Building, later known as Kirkland Hall, was designed by William Crawford Smith, a Confederate veteran who also designed the Parthenon its construction began in 1874. Foote, who had built Old Central, a house still standing on campus. They acquired land formerly owned by Texas Senator John Boyd and inherited by his granddaughter and her husband, Confederate Congressman Henry S. The endowment was eventually increased to $1 million (roughly $23 million in 2021) and though Vanderbilt 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. 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". Cornelius Vanderbilt, the wealthiest man in the United States at the time, had been planning to establish a university on Staten Island, New York, in honor of his mother. The following year, McTyeire stayed at the New York City residence of Cornelius Vanderbilt, whose second wife was Frank Armstrong Crawford Vanderbilt (1839–1885), a cousin of McTyeire's wife, Amelia Townsend McTyeire (1827–1891) both women were from Mobile, Alabama. However, lack of funds and the ravaged state of the Reconstruction Era South delayed the opening of the college. 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. 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. ![]() History Founding and early years ĭrawing of Vanderbilt University's Main Campus from Appletons' Cyclopedia of American Biography (1889) ![]() Vanderbilt has more than 145,000 alumni, with 40 alumni clubs established worldwide. 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 medallists. Ambassadors, 13 governors, 8 Nobel Prize laureates, 2 Vice Presidents of the United States, and 2 U.S. Vanderbilt alumni, faculty, and staff have included 54 current and former members of the United States Congress, 18 U.S. Vanderbilt is a founding member of the Southeastern Conference and has been the conference's only private school since 1966. The Fugitives and Southern Agrarians were based at the university in the first half of the 20th century and helped revive Southern literature among others. With the exception of the off-campus observatory, all of the university's facilities are situated on its 330-acre (1.3 km 2) campus in the heart of Nashville, 1.5 miles (2.4 km) from downtown. Vanderbilt University Medical Center, formerly part of the university, became a separate institution in 2016. 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 is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity". The university comprises ten schools and enrolls approximately 13,800 students from the US and over 100 foreign countries. Founded in 1873, it was named in honor of shipping and rail magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, who provided the school its initial $1-million endowment in the hopes that his gift and the greater work of the university would help to heal the sectional wounds inflicted by the Civil War. Vanderbilt University (informally Vandy or VU) is a private research university in Nashville, Tennessee.
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