VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY

private, coeducational institution of higher education in Nashville-Davidson, Tenn., U.S. Baccalaureate degrees are awarded through the College of Arts and Sciences, School of Engineering, Peabody College, and Blair School of Music. About 40 master's, 40 doctoral, and several professional degree programs are offered through these schools and through the Graduate School, Divinity School, Owen Graduate School of Management, and schools of Law, Medicine, and Nursing. The Jane and Alexander Heard Library anchors a library system that contains more than two million volumes and a television news archive. Vanderbilt is a comprehensive research university; its medical school is known nationally for its research programs. Research is also conducted at the John F. Kennedy Center for Research on Education and Human Development, the Robert Penn Warren Center of Humanities, the Vanderbilt Institute for Public Policy Studies, and Arthur J. Dyer Observatory. Student enrollment exceeds 9,200. The university was established in 1872 as Central University by the Southern branch of the Methodist Episcopal Church. When philanthropist Cornelius Vanderbilt donated $1,000,000 in 1873, the school was reopened as Vanderbilt University. Initially, the university was divided into departments of academics, Bible, law, and medicine; preparatory classes were offered through 1887. The first doctorate was granted in 1879, and an engineering department was formed in 1886. The Methodists retained control of the university until 1914. The Graduate School was founded in 1935. In 1979 Vanderbilt acquired George Peabody College for Teachers, which originated in 1785 as Davidson Academy and developed into a leading teacher-training school. The Blair School of Music, founded in 1964, became a part of the university in 1981. Vanderbilt University educated the astronomer Edward Emerson Barnard; journalists Grantland Rice and Ralph McGill; surgeon Norman E. Shumway; academic poets Cleanth Brooks, Randall Jarrell, and James Dickey; and politicians Theodore G. Bilbo and Albert Gore. After World War I the university became the home of a literary circle called the Fugitives, which included John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and Laura Riding. Distinguished faculty members included those in medicine, such as Alfred Blalock, E.W. Goodpasture, Max Delbrck, Earl W. Sutherland, Jr., and Stanley Cohen, and those in law, notably James McReynolds and Horace H. Lurton.