Vanderbilt sounds even more promising. :) I read a couple of years ago in the WSJ, that Vanderbilt is really going all out to import some smart students via monetary incentives, big ones. Can a smart intellectual Yankee Jew find happiness at Vanderbilt? That was in part what the article was about. It seemed to be a bit of heavy lifting.
I never saw that article, but I don't doubt it. It's been more than a few years since I was a student there. Vandy has always been "more Southern" than, say, Dook, but it has always attracted a substantial number of students from Northern states -- more likely to be from the Midwest (Illinois, Ohio, Indiana) than from the Northeast (Dook seems to draw heavily from New York, Connecticut, New Jersey).
Its student body, then and now, skews toward preppy and rich, but there was/is a fair amount of diversity. More Oriental students than blacks when I was there. No idea what the Jewish percentage was -- not a lot, but enough to support one frat and one sorority which were each supposedly Jewish. Intellectuals? Sure, there were some. I avoided them. :-)
Translaton: we want to make Vandy look like every other top 20 university. No unique southerness to the place should survive. Let's import Jersetyites and turn into the friendly place that is my alma mater, Emory. (*pukes*) Just fill it to the brim with kids who really wanted to go to Dartmouth or Cornell but settled because they didn't make the cut. That would be the worst thing that Vandy could do.
Sorry, the attitude of Vandy's president is really off-putting in my eyes. He also saw Jews as a means of elevating their average SAT scores.