HEDGE FUNDS WITH LIBRARIES. Thus does Joe Malchow of Minding the Campus refer to the well-endowed, if somewhat less so than three months ago, private universities. There's plenty of blame to go around. There's also this.

I have frequently thought that the redemption of our universities was to be found in their economics faculties; these, at least in recent years, have learned to live as isles of their own; they operate, budget, hire, and think independently of the moribund intellectual-administrative alloy that girds the rest of a university against intellectual impiety. Somehow the English, Women's, Native's, Social, Geographic, and Religion departments persistently find common cause with their administrators, the aegis of the latter protecting the barren quarry of the former. As a longsighted professor recently observed to me, it isn't the economics faculty who dominate the decision-making processes; it is those who need the charity; and it is not the economists who are moved into executive positions; it is quite purposefully those who are not adept at making decisions that would upset the school's comfortable stasis.

Amen.