Vanderbilt University - Commodore Yearbook (Nashville, TN)

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Hudson River Railroad Company into the Endowment Fund, in addition to providing the Central University with suitable grounds and suitable buildings. Central University became Vanderbilt University and Vanderbilt University became the best-endowed university in the South. It would seem that an institution launched with such faith and sponsored by such great leaders might succeed, even in a period of depression and chaos, writes Edwin Mims in his History of Vanderbilt University. But the odds were against it. Cooperation presented a major problem. Southern fear of the intellectual and academic raised its head again at this time: Bishop George Pierce was reluctant to support the new project fwhich would include a theological schoolj since theological education could never make but could only mar a preacher, and, anyway, self-made men were better than educated men. And Pierce was with the majority. Nashville presented another problem. Southern Colleges and universities usually found their way into small towns and country-side at this time, but the Commodore could well have taken down his railroad map to note the strategic location of this city of 40,000. More likely the Bishop reminded Vanderbilt that Nashville was a center for the Methodist Church, that the new university would be near the Methodist Publishing House. And so Nashville it was. Nashville, however, proved slow in contributing to the new university. Mims explained the small support in terms of the inherent individualism which characterized Southern communities-a lack of public spirit and cooperation that has continued into the days of much greater comfort and wealth. Nashville initially provided only 328,000 for the purchase of grounds, and it would be another forty years before a substantial contribution would come from Vanderbilt's home community. 19

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that he endow a university and referred him to the Bishop and the Bishop's well-laid plans. The suggestion caught the Com- modore's fancy, wrote the Bishop's daughter. Dinner over, he repaired to the Bishop's room, and the early hours of the morning found him still seated at his bedside as the plans for the foundation of a great university were unfolded to him. And this was but the first of the talks between the Bishop and the Commodore about this new university for the South. Back in Tennessee, people labelled the Bishop's university-building a quixotic dream. The Commodore, on the other hand, found substance in the Bishop's ambitions, figuring that the field of railroad law lost its greatest potential when McTyeire entered the ministry. And the Commodore paid. The Commodore paid seven percent First Mortgage Bonds of the New York Central and

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But the community was not the only problem. The University of Nashville was interested in merging with this new university, and Vanderbilt would gain some twenty acres of campus property and all of the other University's buildings. But negotiations bogged, and the Bishop was forced to write, The Trustees could not come to our terms, and we would not accept theirs. We declined to enter into any combination. We must control entirely or not at all. The Bishop, stipulated as President of the Board of Trust under the terms of the Commodore's gift, was still using his shrewd business sense. After buying tracts of land that varied in size from five acres to thirty-three, he could describe to the Commodore a compact and adjoining seventy acres that was west of the city, beautiful for situation, easy of approach, and of the same elevation as Capitol Hill, which is in full view. The Lord has opened windows in heaven for us, the Bishop wrote in a letter to Landon Garland, a lay leader in the Southern Methodist Church and an educational leader in the South, thot this thing might be. Though not yet named Chancellor, Garland was already marked by the Board and the Bishop as a leader for this new University. Garland called for quality and not quantity when forming university departments. Start nothing, Garland outlined in a letter to the first Board of Trust meeting after the Commodore's gift, in a crippled condition-make people regret that you have not more. Considering a different facet of campus life, Garland labelled campus dormitories the greatest curse that attaches to university education. The Bishop also consulted Garland while the faculty for the Vanderbilt University was being assembled. But personal ambition was pressing its influence, too. Garland warned the Bishop