How Vandy Bested the Ivies
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
