Like many in San Francisco I was upset to learn a few months ago that the California College of the Arts (CCA) was going to close. The CCA has been an important educational and cultural institution in the Bay Area for almost 120 years, and has been located in San Francisco for the last thirty years. The CCA campus will be taken over by Vanderbilt University, a private university located in Nashville, Tennessee.

Although Vanderbilt is a highly selective and strong academic school, it may not be particularly well known in California. In recent years, the only reason I ever gave it much thought was due to Vanderbilt’s extremely strong baseball program. Over the last decade or two, Vanderbilt has consistently had one of the best baseball teams in the country. Recent Vanderbilt alumni who are now big leaguers include Walker Buehler, Sonny Gray, Brian Reynolds, Dansby Swanson as well as two recent Giants, Curt Casali and Mike Yastrzemski.

There is something else San Franciscans should know about Vanderbilt that is relevant to the current moment and raises even more concerns about replacing CCA with a satellite campus of the Tennessee based university. 

In October of last year the Trump administration offered nine universities an opportunity, so to speak, to sign on to a “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.” According to PEN America, “(t)he compact’s conditions cover a wide range of partisan concerns in higher education. Among other things, universities would have to agree to adopt government-approved definitions of sex, cap international student enrollment, enact strict policies of institutional neutrality, and abolish any institutional units (i.e., academic departments, centers, or offices) that ‘purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.’”

This compact is a step beyond the Trump administration’s shakedown of Ivy League and other universities last year because universities that agree to the compact also get preferential treatment from the administration including, according to the New York Times, “priority access to federal funds and looser restraints on overhead costs. Signed compacts would also serve as assurance to the government that schools are complying with civil rights laws.” In other words these universities were offered the opportunity to get more resources from the Trump administration if they signed on to the regime’s right-wing vision for what the university should be and do.

Only nine schools were asked to sign on to the compact, seven, including the University of Virginia, Brown, Dartmouth and MIT quickly indicated they were not interested in making a sharp shift rightward in exchange for a few bucks. An eighth, the University of Texas in Austin, neither signed nor rejected the compact, but has continued to express interest in it and has acceded to some of the demands.

Vanderbilt was also offered this compact and was not among the seven schools to quickly reject what amounts to an effort by the Trump regime to control the academy. Vanderbilt took an approach much like that of the University of Texas, not formally rejecting or accepting the proposal, but indicating an openness to future dialog. In other words San Francisco is losing an important, even historic, cultural institution and is replacing it with a satellite campus of a Trump-friendly university and we are not even getting their baseball team.

It is tempting to see the CCA-Vanderbilt affair as another symptom of tech San Francisco triumphing over an older, more progressive and avant garde iteration of the city. While there is a fair amount of truth in that, the broader context suggests there is more to the story.

During the 2024 mayoral campaign when the since discredited doom loop narrative was still dominant, not least because people like then candidate Daniel Lurie were promoting it, there was talk of bringing a university campus to downtown San Francisco as an anchor to revitalize that neighborhood. Most believed the best option would be to locate another UC campus in San Francisco. Even at the time, that seemed a bit unlikely as UC campuses do not get built, or funded, overnight, and there are many communities in California that would like to be the site of the next UC campus.

It is now apparent that there is no UC campus coming to revitalize downtown San Francisco. It may be less immediately apparent Vanderbilt’s imminent arrival, that Mayor Lurie described as “a powerful testament to the fact that San Francisco is on the rise” fits into a broader pattern of Lurie placing the new San Francisco, for which he has taken a lot of credit, not as a bulwark against MAGA fascism but as MAGA welcoming or at least MAGA accepting. 

The Mayor’s relative silence about ICE kidnappings, general reluctance to even say Donald Trump’s name, coziness with some of the powerful right-wing tech billionaires who are part of the MAGA regime, high regard in which he is held by former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and working to bring one of the few major universities that has flirted with the Trump takeover of higher education to San Francisco are all illustrative of this. In other words, San Francisco’s move rightward is not just happening, but is being facilitated by a mayor who, it turns out, is much more than just a good social media presence.