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........

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