Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, is the sort of highly selective institution that jockeys for the unofficial title of Harvard of the South. Recently, the university's chancellor had a new idea: What if Vanderbilt was also in San Francisco' Maybe it could become the Harvard of the West too. Last month, Vanderbilt announced that it was acquiring the facilities of the financially insolvent California College of the Arts and would be converting the space into a new campus. Private universities have been experimenting with satellite campuses for decades. Typically, these outposts are either overseas or limited to a graduate program or two. The Vanderbilt expansion, set to open in 2027, will be different: It will include a full-blown, four-year undergraduate college, not in Abu Dhabi but in the San Francisco Design District. This new tactic, pioneered by Northeastern University a few years ago, is taking the satellite-campus concept to its logical extreme: the national-chain model of...
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