Vanderbilt University

Today, Vanderbilt enrolls approximately 12,000 students from all 50 U.S. states and over 90 foreign countries in four undergraduate and six graduate and professional schools.  

Vanderbilt University  is a private research university located in Nashville, Tennessee, founded in 1873. The university is named in honor of shipping and rail magnate Cornelius, who provided the school its initial $1 million endowment despite having never been to the South.

 Vanderbilt hoped that his gift and the greater work of the university would help to heal the sectional wounds inflicted by the Civil War.

 With the exception of the off-campus observatory and satellite medical clinics, all of the university's facilities are situated on its campus in of Nashville, 1.5 miles from downtown. Despite its urban surroundings, the campus itself is a national arboretum and features over 300 different species of trees and shrubs.

Several research centers and institutes are affiliated with the university, including the Vanderbilt Institute for Public Policy Studies, Freedom Forum First Amendment Center, Dyer Observatory, and Vanderbilt University Medical Center, the only Level I trauma center in Middle Tennessee.

In 1979, Vanderbilt acquired its neighbor, Peabody 

 Vanderbilt University was an early financial backer of the Corrections Corporation of America prior to its 

on the present value of the United Daughters of the Confederacy's contribution if the inscription bearing the name "Confederate Memorial Hall" was removed from the building or altered.

In 2002 the university decided to rename Confederate Memorial Hall, a residence hall on the Peabody campus 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 must pay damages based 

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

The Court of Appeals' decision has been critiqued by legal scholars.In late July 2005, the university announced that although it had officially renamed the building 

In 2009, Vanderbilt instituted a no-loan policy. The policy states that any student granted admission and a need-based aid package will have an award that includes no student loans.

 in five sub-Saharan African countries, including Mozambique, South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. The revelation made international headlines, with coverage in The 

In 2011, the Oakland Institute, an Oakland, think tank, exposed Vanderbilt University's US$26 million investment in Asset Management, 

a private equity of 'land grabbing,' or taking over agricultural land used by local communities through exploitative practices and using it for commercial export farming ...

Guardian, and led to student protests on campus in 2013, Vanderbilt administrators had caved in to the public outcry and divested from 

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.

During the first 40 years, the Board of Trust, and therefore the university, was under the control of the General 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

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

In 1905, the Board of Trust voted to limit Methodist representation on the board to just five bishops.Former faculty member and bishop Elijah Holed a group attempting to assert Methodist control.In 1910, the board refused to seat three Methodist bishops.

The General Conference in 1914 voted  140 to sever its ties with Vanderbilt; it also voted to establish a new university, Southern Methodist University, and to greatly expand Emory University