Rich Colleges Should Save Nation's Top Newspapers

The New York Times is in "perilous financial condition," and colleges would play the perfect savior, Lee Smith writes in the Chronicle for Higher Education. His plan: Have the seven richest institutions direct 3% of their endowments—which, combined, come to $114 billion— to buying the Gray Lady. "That's for a start." Later on, universities could snap up other papers that "make intellectual life possible."

"Universities have an implied responsibility … to protect and promote a body of knowledge for the benefit of society," he writes. But that body doesn't have to be on newsprint; rather than preserve "the familiar bundle of paper in plastic," we must safeguard "the labor and brain-intensive work of reporting, writing, and editing the millions of fragments of information scattered across the planet every day." (More New York Times stories.)