In January 2025, Daniel Diermeier, the chancellor of Vanderbilt University, attended a dinner in the South Bay with Ned Segal, the former Twitter executive who now serves as Mayor Daniel Lurie’s chief of housing and economic development. Vanderbilt had already announced plans to expand to three satellite campuses across the country. And that evening, Diermeier and Segal teased the possibility of San Francisco being the next stop for what some call “the Harvard of the South.”
One year later, California College of the Arts announced that it would close at the end of the 2026-27 school year and would hand its campus to Vanderbilt for an undisclosed sum.
The deal comes at a turning point for higher education in the U.S. In 2023, 40% of private colleges ended the year in a deficit, twice the rate of public universities, according to Robert Kelchen, head of educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. At this moment of precarity, Diermeier is determined that his university will evolve rather than be relegated to the past. Since he took leadership of Vanderbilt in 2019, the university has gone on an expansion tear…