This is the internet, so I'm willing to let people wildly speculate in interesting ways. Having said that, I don't know this is as impractical as some seem to

This is the internet, so I'm willing to let people wildly speculate in interesting ways. Having said that, I don't know this is as impractical as some seem to think (or at least in the ways some are thinking -- there might be lawsuits about taxation but in terms of establishing a school, less so). All you have to do is admit students with appealing enough characteristics (GPAs, GREs, whatever you can quantify) and you'll immediately establish a reputation out of the gate. Then you build out your faculty by giving out insane incentives to start, from undervalued individuals in the right places. There's enough oversupply in academics to fulfill this need. I might be skeptical too except I've seen this work at the high school and college level. Brand new high schools established that immediately have super high test scores; it establishes a brand immediately. At least one university I know of had a windfall and was smart enough to vacuum up undervalued properties and start pulling in whole colleges and departments spontaneously by making remarkable offers to the right people. Their only problem was that they weren't a new university, so they had a sort of existing old reputation to overcome.