A bishop's family connection redirected Cornelius Vanderbilt's university from Staten Island to Nashville
Cornelius Vanderbilt, the richest man in America, was planning a university on Staten Island. Then a Methodist bishop from Nashville, whose wife was a cousin of Vanderbilt's second wife, came to stay. Holland McTyeire persuaded him to fund a struggling southern college instead, as a gesture toward healing the wounds of the Civil War.
The Methodist Episcopal Church, South had voted in 1872 to found a Central University in Nashville, but money was scarce in the Reconstruction South. Vanderbilt first pledged $500,000 and later doubled it to $1 million, roughly $27 million in 2025 terms. He never asked for the school to carry his name; the trustees renamed it for him anyway in spring 1873. About 200 students enrolled in the fall of 1875. Early campus life was fractious: most of the first faculty left after disputes with McTyeire, including over pay, and the first fraternity chapter was shut down in 1876 only to reappear as a secret society.
The church's grip loosened in court. For four decades the Methodist General Conference effectively controlled the board, and tensions grew over who chose trustees and whether non-Methodists could teach. When the board refused to seat three bishops in 1910, the church sued. The state's highest court decided on March 21, 1914 that the true founder was the Commodore rather than the church, so the board could seat whomever it liked. The Conference voted 151 to 140 to cut ties and put its energy into founding Southern Methodist University and expanding Emory.
The university's research record is striking. In the 1930s Ernest Goodpasture's team learned to grow viruses in fertilised chicken eggs, opening the way to vaccines against smallpox, yellow fever and more. Alfred Blalock and his assistant Vivien Thomas showed that blood volume loss drives traumatic shock and pioneered replacement fluids that saved countless lives in the Second World War. Max Delbruck and Salvador Luria's fluctuation test, published in 1942, showed natural selection acting on random mutations in bacteria, earning a Nobel Prize in 1969.
Its history also includes deep wrongs. Many early leaders had ties to slavery and the Confederacy. From 1945 to 1947 researchers gave 800 pregnant women radioactive iron without consent, disguised as vitamin drinks, leading to a 1998 settlement. In 1960 divinity student James Lawson was expelled for organising sit-ins against segregation, prompting a dozen faculty resignations; decades later the university rehired him as a distinguished professor.
Source: Vanderbilt University
