New chancellor: Vanderbilt will spend to compete in SEC
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Vanderbilt is looking for a new football coach, and the new chancellor and athletic director want to make clear that person will have a say in how the university improves their facilities.
And Vanderbilt will be ready to spend money to make those improvements not only reality, but worthy of being a charter member of the Southeastern Conference.
“We can do a lot," Chancellor Daniel Diermeier told The Associated Press on Wednesday. "And we have an enormous amount of assets and we need to bring them, we need to leverage them in order to advance athletics at university as a whole.”
Vanderbilt fired coach Derek Mason on Nov. 29 after losing the first eight games of his seventh season. Athletic director Candice Lee, who had the interim title removed in May, said this gives Vanderbilt a chance to show its commitment to competing in the SEC.
The SEC's lone private university has the league's smallest football stadium, which had its last major renovations in 1981.
Lee was a women's basketball player on teams that reached two Elite Eights in the NCAA Tournament. Diermeier is a native of Germany and fan of Borussia Mönchengladbach in the Champions League. He also has worked at Stanford and Northwestern in his career, seeing how both paired academic and athletic success.
Diermeier said assessing the situation was his first task at Vanderbilt after being provost at the University of Chicago, now Division III but where Jay Berwanger was the first Heisman Trophy winner in 1935.
“Vanderbilt is a place with a very strong culture and with a very strong sense of values, and we believe that college athletics can be a very important part for our university,” Diermeier said. “There are very few other things that can bring a university together as much as athletics, that can create a sense of...