Students guide the oxen Bill and Lou, pulling a mower in healthier days (Green Mountain College image).

A couple of years ago, I visited Green Mountain College and toured the Vermont college’s post-petroleum farm, which instructs students in ways to conduct agriculture without fossil-fuel inputs. That means that animals do a lot of work on the farm, and the most essential of those animals were a pair of oxen, Lou and Bill. They were magnificent creatures—an embodiment of power, with long horns and formidable muscle under coats the color of creamed coffee.

My tour guides, Dayna Halprin and Laura Wolfgang, and I began talking about the fate of the animals on the farm. They are sent to slaughter or, as Ms. Wolfgang described, sometimes slaughtered by students themselves. As I recall, Ms. Halprin was a vegetarian…

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Wilson College’s 1925 library has been closed for more than a year, but the college has been working with Murray Associates Architects to plan a renovation that would keep the 1925 portion (at left) and replace a 1962 addition with a glass-walled structure. (Murray Associates image)

Chambersburg, Pa. — For such a small institution—it has only 695 students this semester—Wilson College has a very handsome library. It’s a restrained Collegiate Gothic building from 1925 with limestone towers flanking a central doorway and arched windows overlooking the college’s central green. The windows also enliven the interior, which is otherwise plain.

Unfortunately, the library has been closed for more than a year, thanks to an assortment of leaks that are emblematic of the challenges facing the struggling women’s college, which has not been able to meet its enrollment goals. The most …

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In the mid-1990s, Mary Ellen Armentrout took it upon herself to compile a catalog of Ohio’s 115 Carnegie libraries. At the time, she was the interlibrary-loan librarian at Otterbein College, whose Carnegie library now houses the admissions office, and she took The Chronicle on a memorable daylong tour of libraries large and small.

Since publishing her book, Carnegie Libraries of Ohio, she has kept up with the fates of what she calls “my libraries,” and she filed this report on the recent renovation of the Carnegie building at Cedarville University, which was one of the stops on that long-ago tour. The photos are hers too.

The little library in Cedarville, Ohio, that Andrew Carnegie financed in 1908 has been restored to its original beauty thanks to the foresight of Cedarville University administrators. Once a library open to both the college and the town, it later became the…

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• Governor Releases $600-Million for U. of Massachusetts, $20-Million for Community Colleges

• iPoly High School Opens $20-Million Facility on Cal Poly Pomona Campus

In retrospect, it was inevitable: In an era when hardly anyone sends letters on paper and many students can barely even be bothered to check their e-mail, Lehigh University has put its 5,000 campus mailboxes up for sale and switched to a high-tech mail-storage system that is the postal equivalent of compact shelving for libraries.

The system was adopted as the campus post office moved to a new location in a residential and retail complex called Campus Square, which is home to the university bookstore and a fast-food outlet as well as to about 250 students. Instead of holding mail in boxes that—with their corridors—took up about 6,000 square feet, the post office has switched to a rolling-shelving system that fits in a 10-by-14-foot space and houses 5,500 expandable file folders.

As a student’s letter mail is deposited in the appropriate folder, a bar-code reader sends the…

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