Do you know about Berea College? If not, check out this morning's profile in the New York Times:

Berea College, founded 150 years ago to educate freed slaves and "poor white mountaineers, accepts only applicants from low-income families, and it charges no tuition.

"You can literally come to Berea with nothing but what you can carry, and graduate debt free," said Joseph P. Bagnoli Jr., the associate provost for enrollment management. "We call it the best education money can't buy."

Actually, what buys that education is Berea's $1.1 billion endowment, which puts the college among the nation's wealthiest. But unlike most well-endowed colleges, Berea has no football team, coed dorms, hot tubs or climbing walls. Instead, it has a no-frills budget, with food from the college farm, handmade furniture from the college crafts workshops, and 10-hour-a-week campus jobs for every student.

Berea's approach provides an unusual perspective on the growing debate over whether the wealthiest universities are doing enough for the public good to warrant their tax exemption, or simply hoarding money to serve an elite few. As many elite universities scramble to recruit more low-income students, Berea's no-tuition model has attracted increasing attention.

"Asking whether that's where our values lead us is a powerful way to consider what our values are," said Anthony Marx, the president of Amherst College, who considered the possibility of using Amherst's $1 million-per-student endowment to offer free tuition but concluded that it would make no sense, given Amherst's more affluent student body and the fact that the college already subsidizes about half the cost of each student's education.

"We're not Berea, much as we respect them," Mr. Marx said, adding there would be no social justification for giving free tuition to students from wealthy families.

Although this year's market drop is taking its toll, the growth in university endowments in recent years has been spectacular. Harvard's $35 billion endowment, Yale's $23 billion, Stanford's $17 billion and Princeton's $16 billion put them among the world's richest institutions.

Such endowments have helped make higher education one of the nation's crown jewels. As Harvard's president, Drew Gilpin Faust, said in her spring commencement speech this year, endowments at Harvard and other research universities help fuel scientific advances as government support is eroding, and help drive economic growth and expansion in a difficult economy.

Although most universities have only modest endowments, the wealth of the richest has made them increasingly vulnerable to criticism from parents upset about rising tuition costs, lawmakers pushing them to spend more of their money and policy experts arguing that they should be helping more needy students.

"How much do you need to save for future generations, and at what point are you gouging today’s generation?" said Lynne Munson, of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity in Washington.

In January, the Senate Finance Committee requested detailed endowment and spending data from 136 colleges and universities with endowments of at least $500 million, with a possible eye to forcing them to spend at least 5 percent of their assets each year, as foundations are required to do. Large, tax-free endowments "should mean affordable education for more students, not just a security blanket for colleges," said Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, who is reviewing the data.

And that points to the other problem with the article's implications--that perhaps there ought to be some sort of one size fits all set of requirements for how private colleges and universities use their endowments. While I tend to agree with those who find Harvard's amassment obscene--and while I, too, wonder about the ethics of that, both from the perspective of Harvard's non-profit status and from the perspective of Harvard as an educational institution and a standard-bearer for higher education around the world--I do balk at the idea that the solution might be for the government to tell these institutions how they ought to handle their money.

I just don't think the government has a very good track record with this sort of thing, I think we ought to know that by now, and I think we need to think twice before we get all offended, in a collectivist way, by wealthy institutions and decide that we ought to force them to redistribute the wealth. Still, part of me wishes they would do so voluntarily. Part of me also wonders whether we need a new classification for such institutions--if they truly need to operate as they do, and spending 5 percent of the endowment every year is not viable, then maybe they shouldn't be understood as tax-exempt charitable organizations.

On Berea -- this is a higher ed, successful version of the boarding school where I taught a few years ago, and I have to say it is inspiring to see that the school's project is working so well. That was not the case at the boarding school, largely because it was way over-stepping its financial capacities. This school was very tiny--only 80-90 students. And very experimental, in ways that echo Berea--students were deeply embedded in the work of maintaining the school, cleaning their own living spaces and classrooms, maintaining the grounds, cooking much of the food, even chopping and shifting the wood that fed the various buildings' old wood-burning furnaces.

The school discouraged and even actively prevented the kinds of distracted, anti-social tech-based behaviors that affect the concentration and maturation of most teens today: there was no television; there was no internet in the dorms (only in classrooms and the library), so students could not surf and IM all night; cell phones and iPods were frowned on, and Facebook and MySpace were eventually blocked. This was intrusive and, of course, doomed--kids always find a way to plug in. But there were good reasons for it, and it did have the effect of getting kids to be more present, and to invest more completely in one another, in their studies, and in the life of the school.

And this school, like Berea, was deeply committed to providing an otherwise unavailable opportunity to disadvantaged kids. Something like half of the kids were on full or substantial scholarships, which lifted them out of neighborhoods and schools, in Harlem and elsewhere, where the dangers are legion and the likelihood of going on to college is small. These kids went on to college, and they developed an expanded sense of what they could do and be, and of what the world could be for them, along the way.

All to the good--except that the school couldn't afford to pursue that particular mission with the absolute integrity such a mission requires. It had a tiny endowment of only a couple million dollars, and so it found itself dependent on the tuition dollars of paying students to finance the educations of the scholarship kids. That created predictable tensions.

Meanwhile, there was all sorts of skimping at precisely the point where there should have been no skimping at all. With the exception of a few older, excellent teachers, educational quality was abysmal. The school did not pay teachers properly--when I was there, they were paying just about half what more traditional, well-known boarding schools paid--and knowing that it could not compete for top teachers with such low salaries, it did not, for the most part, even bother to try to recruit them. There were thus math teachers who could not do the math they were teaching, and language teachers who were not skilled in the language they were teaching--and this was visible to the kids. There were very few experienced teachers of any sort--and a great many fresh college grads who had never taught, had never thought of teaching, and had no special expertise in any field--but who were hired because they were fondly remembered alums, who would work for cheap in exchange for the nostalgic rush of returning to the scene of so many happy memories. That, it seemed, was the theory, anyhow. That's not quite how it worked out. Instead, you got an institutional culture that was weirdly stagnant, weirdly anti-intellectual, and highly politicized (progressive ideology came increasingly to replace educational substance, the one being easier to produce than the other, and easy, too, to pass off as the other).

Still, the kids themselves were utterly remarkable. They needed this unusual place, and they grew in phenomenal ways from the experience of living and working together to sustain and enhance what one older teacher liked sonorously to call "our shared collective life" (you can see the ideology there, wrapped up in charm).

All of this is to say that the project of the school was a noble one indeed, and that there was much that was wonderful and inspiring about the place. I still think fondly of the kids I knew there--the youngest of whom are going to college this fall--and I still hope that their natural buoyancy and intelligence will allow them to transcend, in college, the educational limitations the school may well have imposed on them without their even knowing it.

It's also to say that my metaphorical hat is off to Berea, which seems to be making highly effective and ethical work of its mission. May more schools take the educational road less travelled by. And may they have the freedom to do so.

UPDATE 7/24: More from Anthony Paletta at Minding the Campus.