Good morning. It’s Monday. Today we’ll find out about what a partnership with the Whitney Museum of American Art will mean for undergraduates at Vanderbilt University’s new Manhattan outpost.
I had a question for Scott Rothkopf, who figures in Vanderbilt University’s we’ll-take-Manhattan strategy. The question was: When was the last time he taught a class?
“You mean like a professor and do a whole seminar?” he said. “I have never taught a full semester. I have spent a lot of time talking with students and interns and doing crits with art students, where you go to their studio and review their work together.”
But Rothkopf, the director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, said he expected to do some teaching, thanks to Vanderbilt. “I think I will,” he said.
Vanderbilt and the Whitney have arranged a partnership that will involve students with the museum. The Whitney and Vanderbilt are sort-of neighbors, now that Vanderbilt has leased the General Theological Seminary’s campus in Chelsea (through a $44 million, 99-year deal that was announced last fall), and the first cohort of 85 undergraduates have taken up residence on the neo-Gothic quadrangle. For Vanderbilt, “it’s almost like you take a piece of Vanderbilt’s natural campus” — in Nashville, not quite 900 miles from Chelsea — “and teleport it to New York,” said Daniel Diermeier, Vanderbilt’s chancellor.
Vanderbilt has an ambitious plan for satellite campuses in several U.S. cities at a time when many of its peer institutions are retrenching. “The premise is, we believe the era of the ivory tower university is over,” Diermeier said. “It’s about creating opportunities for students and our faculty that would be difficult if we were confined to Nashville.”
He said that Vanderbilt’s home base was well suited to providing undergraduate instruction, training health care practitioners with its medical school and offering specialization in the entertainment industry with its proximity to the Grand Ole Opry and the rest of Nashville’s music scene. A presence in New York puts Vanderbilt students in a financial center. Vanderbilt arranged for Diermeier to ring the opening bell at the Nasdaq MarketSite in Times Square the morning before classes began last month.
Diermeier also said that New York had become increasingly important for Vanderbilt as the university remade itself as a more selective school: Its incoming class has more students from the New York area than anywhere else, he said.
One reason, according to Diermeier, is Vanderbilt’s appeal to Jewish students since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel almost three years ago. “We got through that much more successfully than our peer schools,” he said. “This ostracizing, what happened at other universities where students were ostracized or excluded because of their beliefs, that just didn’t happen at Vanderbilt.”
‘We don’t have a Whitney in Nashville’
And then there is the Whitney. Diermeier called the partnership with the museum “one of the clearest examples of what we can’t do in Nashville.”
“We don’t have a Whitney in Nashville,” he said.
Vanderbilt’s arrival dovetails with the Whitney’s push to reach younger audiences. Rothkopf, who called the Vanderbilt cohort “a natural fit,” noted that the Whitney already offered free admission every Friday and one Sunday a month for everyone 25 and under.
But the partnership, which the Whitney sees as a reciprocal model for how a museum can partner with a university and the surrounding community, will go further. Much further, Rothkopf said.
“Quite a few museums that partner with major universities tend to focus on graduate students in art history,” Rothkopf said. The Vanderbilt group probably includes students whose interest in art could carry them through to graduate school, but many are likely to go in other directions.
Under the partnership, Vanderbilt students will serve as interns “not just in our curatorial department but in marketing and education,” Rothkopf said. “Those are the kinds of internships that could lead to careers in other nonprofits or different jobs beyond the art world. If you’re a marketing intern at the Whitney, there are lots of possible things you’ll learn that would be interesting outside the confines of a museum.”
He said that the museum was in discussions for more than a year. Soon after the talks began, “I said, ‘Why don’t we dream bigger’” than just arranging internships, he said. “We’re a cultural anchor in this neighborhood you are now calling your home. It also has world-class art galleries just steps from where you are, and the Shed. Could we be a portal for you to this whole world?”
Weather
A sunny day is ahead with temperatures near 76. Tonight, expect mostly clear skies and a low around 58.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Sept. 21 (Yom Kippur).
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“Absolutely nothing has happened.” — Jason Froimowitz, the transportation committee chairman of Manhattan Community Board 6, on the lack of progress on a plan to create a “busway” on a one-mile stretch of 34th Street. It’s been three months since Mayor Zohran Mamdani said the long-delayed project was moving forward.
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METROPOLITAN diary
At Rao’s
Dear Diary:
I have been reading about Rao’s, at the corner of Pleasant Avenue and East 114th Street, for years. It is notoriously hard to get a table there, but it was on my bucket list. One day, I decided to try.
Arriving at the bright-red storefront at the bottom of a nondescript apartment building, I encountered what appeared to be a half-dozen regulars in suits mingling at the bar.
I took a seat on one of the stools.
“What do you want?” the bartender asked gruffly.
“Manhattan, please,” I replied, a slight trepidation in my voice.
He made the drink and put it in front of me.
“Can I eat dinner at the bar?” I asked.
“No,” he barked. “And the wait list is 10 years.”
The drink was beyond stiff, all the better to savor while stretching out the evening.
The small number of tables were soon packed with beefy types and laden with hefty dishes of pasta. Raucous laughter filled the room.
Two women in their early 20s sat next to me at the bar, and we began to talk. They lived in the neighborhood. We chatted for the better part of an hour about affordable housing, social causes and Spanish Harlem.
Suddenly, the women got up and wished me a good night. I turned and saw an older man gesturing them toward his table.
I finished my drink, paid the check and left. Ravenously hungry, I devoured a sack of White Castle sliders while walking the mile home.
— Kayvan Gabbay
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
Davaughnia Wilson and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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The post Why Vanderbilt and the Whitney Museum Are Partners appeared first on New York Times.
