Vanderbilt University Eyes a New Campus in Florida
Plus, Bill Clinton’s new book, and a tough legal challenge: finding a federal judge in Boston who lacks a Harvard degree.
The flow of talent and capital to lower tax, lower regulation states such as Florida and Texas is a recurring theme around here. Usually the talent is athletes, musicians, or money managers. Today, the newest newsworthy “move to Florida” development involves a university.
My former New York Sun colleague Amanda Gordon and her Bloomberg colleagues report that Vanderbilt “is exploring construction of a campus for graduate business and computing programs in West Palm Beach.”
The Bloomberg story paraphrases Vanderbilt’s chancellor, Daniel Diermeier, as saying, “moving to Palm Beach would enable the university to capitalize on the migration of jobs to Florida.” It names Steve Ross and Jon Winkelried as among those with ties to the area and to Vandy, whose main campus is in Nashville, Tennessee.
If Diermeier’s name rings a bell, it may be because you saw his Wall Street Journal opinion piece earlier this week, “Free Speech Is Alive and Well at Vanderbilt University.” He was dean of the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago from 2014 to 2016 and was named provost of the University of Chicago in 2016.
The University of Chicago connection is key. Back in 2023, when Melissa Gilliam was named president of Boston University, she noted that the president of University of Chicago from 2006 to 2021, Robert Zimmer, “built a tight circle of future higher ed leaders, mentoring, promoting, and helping to launch the careers of the current presidents of Dartmouth, Caltech, Vanderbilt, Clark, and Colby College. And now Boston University.” Zimmer was provost of Brown University from 2002 to 2006 and a graduate of Stuyvesant High School in New York City and the Brandeis University class of 1968. Bret Stephens wrote about Zimmer and his free-speech principles in a memorable 2017 New York Times column, America’s Best University President.
As higher-ed strategy, the “satellite campus” approach is not without tradeoffs. The upsides are growth and, potentially, some fresh and new energy. The downsides include the risks of brand dilution and the challenge of maintaining consistent standards of excellence across geographic distances. Cornell has a medical school in Qatar, NYU has campuses in Shanghai and in the United Arab Emirates; Northeastern University has operations in Arlington, Va.; Charlotte, N.C.; London; Miami; Seattle; Oakland, Calif.; Portland, Maine; and Vancouver and Toronto, Canada. For some faculty, it can be an attraction—spend the winter teaching in Miami instead of in Boston. There are also political risks, especially overseas in unfree countries but also even within the United States; there would be pressure on Vanderbilt to evacuate Florida every time Governor DeSantis or one of his successors enacts some law that doesn’t fit some student or professor’s idea of enlightened government.
Plenty of other industries have seen national or international consolidation. In retail, for example, instead of Filene’s and Jordan Marsh in Boston and Garfinckel’s and Hechts in Washington and Burdines in Florida and Robinsons-May in California, there were Macy’s everywhere. Why that mostly hasn’t happened yet in higher education or in academic medicine is a topic for another day. And it’s a long step from one satellite campus in West Palm Beach to becoming the Macy’s of higher education. It wouldn’t surprise me, though, to see additional universities and health systems joining the flow of talent and money to Florida and Texas.
Recusal parade: Elsewhere on the higher education beat, there’s a comedy under way in the case of Bauer v. President and Fellows of Harvard College.
That’s the federal civil case brought in February 2024 by ten Harvard graduates “requesting an injunction ordering Harvard to take concrete and affirmative steps to end antisemitism on its campus and hold accountable those who allowed antisemitism to fester and seeking restitution for the devaluation of their Harvard degrees caused by Harvard’s abject failure to address its antisemitism problem.”
The case was originally assigned to Judge Julia Kobick. She has an A.B. from Harvard (2005) and a J.D. from Harvard Law School (2010). Kobick recused herself from the case on February 22. She cited a federal law that says judges should disqualify themselves from proceedings where their “impartiality might reasonably be questioned” or where they “have a financial interest in the subject matter in controversy.” The case involves the devaluation of Harvard degrees, and Kobick has two of them, so the decision is understandable. She ordered the case randomly assigned to another district judge.
That turned out to be Judge Indira Talwani. She, too, turned out to be a 1982 graduate of “Harvard/Radcliffe College.” She also recused herself.
The case was then reassigned to Judge George O’Toole, Jr. He, too, has a 1972 degree from Harvard Law School. O’Toole doesn’t yet appear to have recused himself, but if he follows the pattern of his two colleagues, he might need to.
You might think that for convenience’s sake, if there are two court cases having to do with antisemitism at Harvard, they might be assigned to the same judge, as some similar issues and facts apply. Yet the judge in the other Harvard antisemitism federal lawsuit, Kestenbaum v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, Richard Stearns, is also a Harvard Law School graduate. Judge Talwani, who was originally assigned that case, recused herself from that one, too.
Whichever judge finally ends up with this case, with or without a Harvard degree, will certainly be kept busy by Harvard’s lawyers. In the Kestenbaum case, Judge Stearns on Thursday morning entered an order granting in part and denying in part Harvard’s four-page “motion for leave to file excess pages” beyond the 20 to which a combined motion to dismiss and motion to strike is ordinarily limited. The judge said Harvard could have 30 pages, not the 35 pages it wanted. The Harvard motion was signed by Felicia Ellsworth, a former clerk to Chief Justice Roberts, along with three other WilmerHale lawyers (Seth Waxman among them) and four King & Spalding lawyers, for a total of eight Harvard lawyers.
Harvard’s mission: Harvard’s interim president and provost Thursday announced two new “working groups,” one on “open inquiry and constructive dialogue” and another on “institutional voice” They each have a list of professors associated with them. The announcement of the institutional voice one declared, “The mission of the University, captured in its motto, is the pursuit of truth in all its forms.”
That struck me as an interesting formulation. Harvard tells its employees something slightly different, which is that “Harvard’s mission is to advance new ideas and promote enduring knowledge.”
And it tells its prospective college students something else, too, which is that “The mission of Harvard College is to educate the citizens and citizen-leaders for our society.”
Harvard’s now-former president, Claudine Gay, in her 2023 inaugural address, said “what Harvard was made to do” was “to question the world as it is and imagine and make a better one.”
The Harvard College charter of 1650 spoke of the purposes of “the advancement of all good literature arts and sciences” and “the education of the English & Indian youth of this Country in knowledge and godliness.”
Anyway, one of the causes and consequences of Harvard’s recent troubles may be some lack of common understanding on the mission. Claudine Gay got in deserved trouble for her use of the phrase “my truth.” Now instead of “the truth” we have “truth in all its forms.” Maybe Harvard should start putting that instead of “Veritas” on the sweatshirts.
I’m not against an expansive definition of truth—think of Keats, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” or consider how religious and scientific truths may exist side by side—but I do have at least a twinge of a reservation that “truth in all its forms” is a formulation that leaves an excessively wide berth for falsehoods and for political activism founded on falsehoods.
There are some high-quality people on the working groups. I wish them luck. It’s a choice to have the groups be made up of faculty members alone rather than students, staff, alumni, members of the governing boards, guest participants from other institutions, or other “stakeholders.” Interim president Garber may figure that the more he can give the professors the impression that they are running things, the less he will hear them complaining that they are not.
Anyway, when historians look back at it 50 years from now, it could be that Vanderbilt’s move into Florida, if it happens, looms larger than the Harvard working groups.
New Clinton book: Every Democratic politician since Bill Clinton left office has had to reckon with the possibility that Bill Clinton would somehow affect their own ability to get elected by capturing the spotlight in the way that he has a rare way of doing.
Clinton surfaced today to tout a book that he has coming out November 19, 2024, “Citizen: My Life After the White House.” Election Day is November 5.
All the pre-publication publicity—the excerpt in the New Yorker or the Atlantic or the New York Times magazine, the interview with “60 Minutes” or some other carefully chosen large-audience outlet—is lined up well in advance for a book like this. If you were a Republican operative, maybe you’d want some of the most newsworthy material to start leaking the last week or October or first week of November just to remind people of Clinton’s ties to Trump and create some last-minute intra-Democratic party strife?
Clinton probably figures he’s being extra-gracious by giving up a week or two of pre-holiday book sales and delaying the timing of the book’s release to two weeks after the election. It looks like it’ll either be Biden’s post-re-election honeymoon or, following a Trump victory, a season for Democratic recriminations. Either way, Clinton’s timing looks to be choice.
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