The December 26, 2007 New York Times reports that Harvard and Yale and a number of other elite institutions have become breathless at the growing number of outstanding candidates for admission that they receive each year and are thinking of expanding. There have been murmurs of this in The Chronicle and in Ivy alumni magazines as the idea has been spun out over the past half year.

During my tenure as president of two universities I grew them both. There seems to be no principled reason why if a university wants to get bigger it shouldn’t. What I don’t understand is the justification that institutions are giving for their proposals. They fret that the size of their campuses are finite, the applicants of outstanding aptitude almost infinite, and they are depressed by the thought of having to turn...

Let’s play a game. Fifty states presently make up the United States. There are 52 weeks in the year. Let’s assign one week to each state, give another week to the nation’s capital, the District of Columbia, and put one week aside for vacation. Now let’s trade. One state will give up its representation in Congress for one week each year in order to allow D.C. to have a fair share of the voting rights on Capitol Hill.

Here is how it will work. You live in Michigan. From February 1–7 none of your federal representatives will be able to cast a vote. You live in Nevada. From March 1–7 none of your representatives will be able to cast a vote. You live in North Carolina. From April 1-7 none of your representatives will be able to cast a vote. OK, you get the picture. What? You care about the crucial votes coming up during those weeks? Well, sorry, you have no vote.

I live in the...

Harvard recently announced that it was going to use a little more of the income on its $35-billion endowment to provide some additional financial aid to more of its student body. The details can be found in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and every other media outlet in America, perhaps the world. It is rightly considered big news. Other institutions, Swarthmore, Duke, University of Pennsylvania and Pomona, are already following Harvard’s lead each in their own way. May we ask, “What does this mean for me?”

The institutions that have the ability to do what Harvard has done can be counted on the fingers of one’s hands. Okay, make it twenty. As a percentage of the undergraduate enrollment in the United States, the number of students affected is almost trivial. The combined undergraduate population of all the Ivy League universities...

Reading Room, a new blog on the online New York Times, is a virtual conversation that gives a twist to the traditional book-club motif. With two layers of dialogue taking place simultaneously, one between selected commentators and the other by the general public, the reader gets a medley of thoughts about a book and its author, similar to a robust conversation moving across the table at a Manhattan Upper West Side dinner party. Informal, informed, with tidbits of insider information tossed around as an added treat.

Dialogues run for a month. Previously, a new translation of War and Peace filled the Web and The Education of Henry Adams is now being addressed by a panel that includes Jill Abramovitz, Thomas Mallon, Gary Hart, and Jennifer Schuessler. Newspaperwoman, novelist, politician, and book-review editor offer...

Academic salaries reflect the marketplace, in much the same way that compensation does in the nonacademic world. In general, the medical faculty makes more than the law faculty, who in turn make more than the engineers, who nearly tie with the science faculty, whose salaries trump the humanities faculty, and regrettably, in almost all cases, the teachers of first year French get the last slice of the baguette. More on the relativism of salaries in the humanities can be found in the December 4th posting by my fellow Brainstormer, Stan Katz.

But none of the teaching salaries compare to the recent reports about football coaches. USA Today tells us that the average salary for the 120 major-college...

My eldest son recently married a wonderful woman who he shared a suite with in their undergraduate days at Columbia University. News of their wedding was published in the Style section of the Sunday New York Times. Lots of friends wrote me congratulatory notes, as many men as women, demonstrating I suspect, something of a change in readership over the years.

To facilitate crafting of the paper’s section, the Times requires the prospective bride and groom to submit a variety of relevant data beyond their basic names, addresses, etc., on a form with instructions that reads not unlike a college application, including, “Mention any noteworthy awards . . . as well as charitable activities and/or special achievements,” include a statement about “how the couple met.” As a throwback to the heydays of high society, the paper also requests the residences and occupations of the couple’s...

Full disclosure. I am a lawyer. One of my two sons and one daughter-in-law are lawyers. Some of my closest relatives and best friends are lawyers. But even with these personal connections, I’m not sure how many lawyers this great nation requires.

In the past few years, several new law schools have opened, or are preparing to do so: Charleston School of Law, UC Irvine, Drexel, SUNY-Binghamton, and Wilkes University, to mention only a few. Establishing a new school at any university is a pricey and time-consuming enterprise. Facilities are needed, professors and students sought. One can only assume that the decisions to do so on these campuses were carefully calculated, neither arbitrary nor capricious acts. Each school must have prepared a business plan, calculated student demand against costs, looked closely at matriculant aspirations, faculty requirements and societal needs. The...

Legislators are concerned about college costs and a good thing, too. But of course, when they talk about costs, they don’t mean costs; they mean prices. They hear from their constituents that tuition is high and going higher quickly, too quickly for comfort, and so they are determined to mitigate the problem or at least create an incentive for universities to do so. The patient has fever; lets chill the thermometer!

Controlling the price of higher education has the illusion of virtue, in the same way you would do so for gasoline and electricity and all the other necessities of life. Easier said than done. The cost may exceed the benefit. The reason that prices are going up at colleges and universities is because costs are going up – costs for gasoline and electricity and all the other necessities of life. Not to mention professors and other talented professionals who are...

Styles and habits change, techniques and preferences shift, evolution occurs in everything from medical practice to women’s fashion to corporate and academic management style. When my first son was born in 1975, the obstetrician came to the assignment with nearly 50 years of previous deliveries. This was a time of dramatic changes in the delivery room: allowing fathers to be present, natural childbirth, and asking hospitals to provide a serene, quiet atmosphere for the birth — giving the child a gentle start in the world. Our physician’s comment was, “We’ll do it any way you want. I’m old enough to remember when it was considered best medical practice to quickly bathe the newborn in ice-cold water!”

Recently, The New York Times, in an article by Nelson Schwartz, reported that the business community is recruiting a new type of executive: the team builder. According to quotes by Warren...