Get ready for Vanderbilt University San Francisco, and part of it will be called “California College of the Arts Institute at Vanderbilt,” as Vanderbilt has basically bought up the dying husk of the California College of the Arts.
There has been some hopeful rumor floating around for the last six months or so that the prestigious Nashville-based Vanderbilt University might open a downtown San Francisco campus, as SF leaders have spent the last few years aggressively trying to court a university to open downtown. Well, Mayor Daniel Lurie announced Tuesday morning that Vanderbilt will indeed open an SF campus, as the Chronicle reports.
But in terms of the new Vanderbilt campus engineering some sort of downtown SF recovery, that ain’t gonna happen, as the new Vanderbilt SF satellite campus will not exactly be downtown.
That’s because Vanderbilt is buying up the Potrero Hill campus of the effectively doomed California College of the Arts (CCA). So the Vanderbilt SF campus will be at the very ascendant border of the Potrero Hill and Mission Bay neighborhoods, some six blocks from the Chase Center.
You can see Mayor Dabiel Lurie welcome Vanderbilt and the school's chancellor Daniel Diermeier in the video above from Tuesday morning’s press conference (which does not start until the 13:45 mark). Though the conference gets cut short because of a medical emergency affecting someone identified as “Marv.”
“Vanderbilt’s decision to invest in our city is a powerful testament to the fact that San Francisco is on the rise,” Lurie said in a press release. “My administration is building a thriving city core where people live, work, play and learn, and now, we’re welcoming another institution that will invest for the long term. As Vanderbilt establishes its presence, they will carry forward the California College of the Arts’ legacy and continue the work of educating the next generation of creative leaders in our city.”
Vanderbilt chancellor Daniel Diermeier referred to the new campus as “Vanderbilt University San Francisco,” which has a nice ring to it. But according to a CCA press release, "Vanderbilt also plans to operate a CCA Institute at Vanderbilt which will include, among other things, the Wattis Institute of Contemporary Arts, will maintain CCA archival materials, and will serve as a vehicle for CCA alumni engagement.”
“Our goal, in a sentence, is to create a place that creates creators,” Vanderbilt's Diermeier said during the press conference. “San Francisco’s vibrant startup ecosystem, the concentration of global technology firms and talent, and its deeply rooted arts and design communities will enable our students and faculty to engage in experiential learning, internships, venture creation, and research.”
That seems a coded way of saying that Vanderbilt officials were more interested in proximity to the AI hotspots of Dogpatch, Potrero Hill and Mission Bay, as compared to a downtown location that Team Lurie would have seemed to prefer.
And this news has to disappoint the Chronicle’s owners at the Hearst Corporation. They had clearly been hoping that Vanderbilt would move in to the Chronicle building, or the adjacent (and long-stalled) 5M project which the Hearst Corporation also owns.
Regardless, the new Vanderbilt campus would only have about 1,000 students, so it is unlikely to be a very powerful economic engine. The Vanderbilt San Francisco campus is expected to open for the 2027-28 academic year, but will require some state and federal regulatory approvals first.
CCA still plans to graduate students in the 2026-27 academic year, and remaining students at the school will have to apply to transfer to Vanderbilt, or elsewhere.
Related: Now Vanderbilt University Is Apparently Exploring a Downtown SF Campus [SFist]
Image: CCA.edu
