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At a dinner in San Francisco this year, an attendee suggested to Daniel Diermeier, the chancellor of Vanderbilt University, that the Nashville institution founded 150 years ago should build a campus in the Bay Area.

The proposal wasn’t completely out of left field: Vanderbilt was already designing a new campus in West Palm Beach, Florida, entering a 99-year lease for a former theological seminary in New York City and planning an expansion in Nashville, Tennessee.

The Bay Area has no shortage of world-class schools, with Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley, flanking the region. Nonetheless, “community interest is high,” Diermeier said, especially as a means to revitalize San Francisco’s downtown area. For its part, the university is attracted to the area’s t

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