Something to learn from the National Academy Press?  “Making our material easily and freely available helps us sell books.”  I have thought that Bruce Eckel has taught me more than anyone else the power of giving away high quality technical books on the web through his Thinking in Java

The Chronicle of Higher Education 2001 Almanac has lots of potentially useful statistics on American Higher Education.

Forget special --ordinary is good:  “Ordinary is good. For one thing, ordinary means you are never lonely, because everyone is more or less, like you. Ordinary also means that if you don't achieve excellence, it's all right because that's not what's truly important anyway. What's important in life is the difficult, how you approach it, how you gut it out, how you find the treasure in it and bring that treasure back to the living from the river of death. How you behave to those closest to you. What you give to your community.”  (An essay I enjoyed reading while visiting my family in Toronto in August.)