evidence: • Ninety-five percent of US colleges and universities have an endowment equivalent to less than 1 percent of Harvard’s. [...] These claims have merit. But private institutions, especially those with significant resources, should be doing more, as indeed some are. Many of these institutions, as the urbanist scholar Davarian L. Baldwin shows in grim detail in his book In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower, are islands of privilege in or near areas of high poverty and poor public schools—a reality made painfully apparent by the disparate effects of the pandemic. They should be partnering with public libraries on literacy and civic programs; providing legal and other services to the needy; pledging, as Yale has done recently, larger payments in lieu of taxes (or PILOTS) to their municipality; subsidizing rents or otherwise supporting locally owned businesses; and making direct investments in community improvements. They should be opening their doors wider to qualified transfer students from local community colleges. They should be serving veterans, incarcerated people, and local public school students, whose prospects to attend college can be markedly improved by after-school tutoring and other "wrap-around" services of the kind that affluent families take for granted.