As San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie was at City Hall Tuesday morning hailing Vanderbilt University’s decision to start a new campus in the city, Jerome Kim was absorbing the deal in shock.
In 2027, the Nashville-based Vanderbilt will be taking over the campus of California College of the Arts, where Kim is in his third year of a five-year architecture program leaving the future of his degree in doubt. The news came as a complete surprise to Kim, who learned about it in an email from CCA less than two hours before the press conference.
“Frankly, the first thing I said was, ‘What the fuck?’” Kim said.
Kim, an international student from South Korea, said when he started at CCA in 2024, he wasn’t sure what to expect. He said that he’s been inspired by the passion of fellow students, who he said rarely leave the campus so as to maximize their hours on the school’s machines and instruments as they pursue industrial design, fashion, ceramics, and fine arts. “They are very passionate,” he said, pausing to reflect. “I think I’ve used that word so many times.”
CCA’s campus near Potrero Hill was quiet Tuesday, the students still on winter break. A small beat-up pickup truck was parked outside, a giant slab of wood in its bed, likely to be transformed into something new in the school’s crafts and furniture shop.
While city officials and Vanderbilt administrators trumpeted the news, and CCA’s financial struggles have hardly been a secret, the acquisition comes at a steep and long-term cost to San Francisco’s creative sector, and to professors and students like Kim, whose degree is now in limbo. For decades, CCA has been home to hundreds of notable faculty and graduates, including Ako Castuera, a storyboard artist for Adventure Time, the painter Robert Bechtle, and the ceramicist Woody De Othello.
Vanderbilt will replace CCA with its own full-time residential campus for about 1,000 undergraduates and an undisclosed number of graduate students. At the press conference in City Hall, Vanderbilt chancellor Daniel Diermeier said the deal, negotiated with a team led by Lurie’s chief of housing and economic development Ned Segal, was completed in less than ten months. Invoking Vanderbilt’s motto, crescere aude, or “dare to grow,” at the press conference, Diermeier aims to transform the CCA campus radically and quickly. “This morning, we celebrate; this afternoon, the work begins,” he said.
Born and raised in West Berlin, Diermeier was a former assistant professor at Stanford’s business school in the 1990s. At the press conference, he applauded Vanderbilt’s collaboration with CCA president David Howse, and the college’s board. The chancellor said financial terms of the deal are confidential and that Vanderbilt will “support CCA during their wind down.” Beyond saying Vanderbilt will maintain CCA’s Wattis Institute of Contemporary Arts, a vague commitment to preserve CCA’s archives, and saying the new campus will offer an “arts education,” details of its support are thin.
Pressed for specifics about whether CCA students can transfer to Vanderbilt, the Chancellor was noncommittal. “We will consider that, but that’s a different conversation,” he said. “We are not absorbing CCA in any way, shape, or form.”
After the press conference, Howse, the CCA president, told me the college’s students learned the news about their college folding Tuesday morning. “We don’t expect them to sort of absorb the news, and then be able to process and think about it,” he said. CCA will graduate a class of about 200 students this year and next, he said, assuming they want to stay at a school that will cease to exist. “What we will have to do is identify schools that would be willing to take on students,” Howse said.
He acknowledged that for CCA students and many San Franciscans, the college’s decision to dissolve would come as a blow. “It’s not a moment of pride at all,” he said. “The weight of this moment is very real.” (A disclosure: A relative of Gazetteer SF’s founder sits on the school’s board.)
Howse said that CCA’s trustees searched for a way for the college to stay afloat, but the school couldn’t avoid the economic realities many independent schools are facing. CCA was operating at a deficit, with its enrollment in decline and the cost of tuition increasing. (CCA’s annual tuition is between $50,000 and $60,000.)
Supervisor Matt Dorsey, whose district covers CCA’s Design District campus, was also at the press conference. He told Gazetteer SF that he feels for the students, and that at the same time he sees his role as a cheerleader for the neighborhood. “I’m grateful that we didn't have a gut-punch of losing an institution without something like a Vanderbilt to transition into,” Dorsey said.
Like many students and faculty members, Kim, the third-year architecture student I met on campus, is thinking hard about his time at CCA, what it will add up to. His experience at the school has “been great,” he told me. “Actually, well, up until today.”
