The time has come for the nation's wealthiest colleges and universities to rescue its leading newspapers — resources almost as vital to higher education's purpose as libraries, laboratories, classrooms, and concert halls. The plan I have in mind would call upon the richest institutions to set aside 3 percent of their endowments to buy The New York Times. That's for a start. Additional purchases of other newspapers by other endowments should follow.

Last month Arthur Sulzberger Jr., chairman of the New York Times Company, told shareholders that the company was not for sale, dismissing media reports to the contrary as "ill informed." But the Times and other major city dailies across the nation are in perilous financial condition: The Times recently eliminated 100 jobs in its newsroom, a cut that the paper's executive editor suggested could have an impact on its journalism. Other publications, including the Los Angeles Times, The Dallas Morning News, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and The Philadelphia Inquirer are in worse shape. The Baltimore Sun and The Boston Globe have closed foreign bureaus. The San Francisco Chronicle, losing more than $1-million a week, slashed a quarter of its editorial staff last year.

Why should colleges assume responsibility, or even care about the plight of newspapers? A higher-education institution's primary obligation is to its particular constituencies, of course, especially to its students. Consider student needs. How would students be able to think about the world beyond the institution's walls without the constant flow of timely information collected by journalists?

Moreover, faculty members are the experts that the news media often cite. The comments and observations of professors in newspapers like the Times, based on their research and expertise, promote the intellectual resources of their institutions and expand every reader's knowledge and understanding of the issue at hand. In addition to what colleges and universities owe their students, faculty members, alumni, and others, universities have an implied responsibility (the tax code is kind to education) to protect and promote a body of knowledge for the benefit of society. That body of knowledge includes the current as well as the traditional: The war in Iraq along with the Peloponnesian, the rise of the middle class in China as well as the decline of the Middle Ages in the West, the retreat of the glaciers in Greenland as well as the fundamentals of physics.

Never has the need to protect journalism as the source of current knowledge been more evident than now. Surveys of Americans unearth disturbing shards of information: Many cannot name a single U.S. Supreme Court justice; some do not read a single nonfiction book a year.

Let me be clear. I am not arguing that newspapers must be preserved in their historical newsprint form. Many younger readers in particular prefer getting their information electronically. The familiar bundle of paper in plastic landing on the doorstep may well disappear over time, as newspapers migrate to the Internet to meet the audience.

What must be preserved is the complex and expensive enterprise of collection that underlies a newspaper — the labor and brain-intensive work of reporting, writing, and editing the millions of fragments of information scattered across the planet every day. Doesn't the Internet do that now? No, the Internet is not a source of information; it is a means of distributing information in bewildering bulk — true, false, significant, trivial, timely, old, brilliant, maniacal — from an endless array of sources. Some of it is wonderfully rich in detail, reliable, and level-headed; some of it is fantastical and malicious.

In large part the reliable information now on the Internet has originated with the thousands of reporters employed by hundreds of newspapers and radio and television stations — as well as the wire services, like AP and Bloomberg, that serve them. To pay for that enormous network, newspapers have, of course, wrapped heavy layers of advertising around their news columns. Now they are struggling to create a revenue stream on the Internet. The challenge is daunting. Consider classified advertising, the financial spine of many newspapers. A lawyer in the nation's capital in search of a paralegal can pay The Washington Post close to $500 for a several-line classified print and online ad that runs for 10 days. But for only $25 the lawyer can post the job for a full 30 days on Craigslist, the vast online classified network.

Whether in newsprint or online, how can the Post compete? Craigslist's revenues have to support only the few people who run the service. The Post's classified revenues have to help subsidize police reporters, political columnists, education writers, book reviewers, and others. Newspapers can charge readers for online access; The Wall Street Journal has done that with some success. But it's hard to imagine that pay-for-view will make up for enormous advertising losses.

Investors can't imagine it. During 2007 the stock prices of newspaper chains plummeted. Yes, there were exceptions. Rupert Murdoch bought The Wall Street Journal and the rest of Dow Jones for a hefty premium above market price. But even that sale sustained the rule. The proper Bancroft family, owner of Dow Jones for generations, agonized before selling to the imperious Murdoch. Would he insert some trashy features from his raffish New York Post into the Journal? If the Bancrofts thought the news business had a financial future, they might not have sold to Murdoch.

Although other newspapers are worthy of rescue, no newspaper is more important to national discourse than The New York Times, and a collective of colleges would have the resources, and the lack of short-term profit motive, to buy it. A million or so subscribers and newsstand buyers across the country and the world depend largely on the paper for their news, 140,000 buyers on campuses among them. That number, moreover, does not include the pass-along readership on every campus, nor take into account the thousands of times that professors across the country use individual Times articles for classes and students use them for research. Compared to other newspapers, the information-gathering resources of the Times are enormous. It has 43 correspondents in 25 bureaus around the world as well as a dozen or so bureaus in the United States.

For all of its prowess and presence, however, the Times is threatened. Like its colleagues, it suffers from declines in both readership, which was down 4.5 percent in 2007, and ad revenues, which dropped 4.7 percent. The stock price has fallen from $45 a share at the end of 2002 to around $17 a share at the beginning of 2008. A company that had a market value of $6.5-billion five years ago is now worth about $2.4-billion.

The shareholders are angry, especially the disenfranchised shareholders. Although it's a publicly traded company, the Times is controlled by the Sulzberger family through a two-tiered form of stock ownership. The public can buy and sell Class A shares, the great majority of the total shares, on the market, but such owners are allowed to elect only five of the 15 directors. The rest are elected by the owners of Class B stock, who are overwhelmingly members of the Sulzberger family.

Now the Sulzbergers seem to have a challenger, a pair of hedge funds that have acquired almost 20 percent of the Class A shares. They could form a power bloc that would make life continuously uncomfortable for the Sulzbergers. What might they do to maximize the newspaper's value? They might try to raise revenues by stamping The New York Times brand on all sorts of communications products, some admirable but others shabby. They might try to cut expenses by closing foreign bureaus. Understandably, the Sulzbergers are wary of outside control.

While the family members must be as dismayed as other shareholders by the decline of their wealth, they don't crave that wealth at the expense of betraying the revered trust that has been handed down to them: the scope and integrity of one of the world's great newspapers. What if the Sulzbergers could sell their shares to a trustworthy investor, one that was interested in maximizing intellectual value rather than financial value? The endowments of the nation's seven wealthiest private universities — Harvard University, Yale University, Stanford University, Princeton University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Columbia University, and the University of Pennsylvania — would be that reliable proprietor. At the end of the most recent fiscal year their combined endowments totaled just under $114-billion. If each university put 3 percent of its endowment in a pool, the sum of $3.4-billion would very likely be enough to buy the paper. At that price the current shareholders, Sulzbergers and non-Sulzbergers alike, would receive a premium of $1-billion above the market price.

Would the institutional owners hear a howl of protest from some alumni about buying "that liberal rag?" Probably, but on the seven campuses, the Times is broadly accepted as an essential, although fallible, source of information. Would the purchase divert money from other worthy purposes, like tuition support for poor and middle-class students? The money used to buy the Times would not be a gift but an investment with a monetary return, although a much smaller return than natural-gas fields or hedge funds would provide. Would the university owners be tempted to interfere in coverage of issues close to their campus's hearts? Probably, but they would resist the temptation, as newspaper owners generally do. The presence of newshounds in a labor force guarantees embarrassing leaks to other news organizations.

As owners, the institutions would not get involved in setting editorial policy, directing coverage of higher education, or in any other news or business matter. Each college or university would appoint a director to the board, and each director's vote could be weighted according to the institution's financial contribution. The board would operate like most traditional corporate boards. Its primary role would be to hire and fire the chief executive, who would ultimately be responsible for the remainder of the hiring and firing, expansion, retreat, and the rest. For the CEO to keep his or her job, the Times would have to pass some sort of financial test, such as being at least marginally profitable in any five-year period.

But the more important test, one the board might conduct with surveys of opinion leaders, would be whether the Times continued to do its job of providing society in general, and higher-education institutions in particular, with timely, reliable, and thorough information. Because the ultimate goal at the end of the day, for the institutions that invested in the Times — as well as for the others who might eventually invest in other newspapers — would be to help ensure the continuing availability of the kind of information that helps make intellectual life possible.

Higher-education institutions and newspapers have an essential bond — a dedication to the accumulation and dissemination of knowledge — that makes them mutually dependent. Over the years newspapers have generally defended colleges and universities as sanctuaries for the exchange of ideas — no matter how repugnant some of those ideas may be — and championed expenditures on education. Now it's time for higher education, specifically the nation's wealthiest institutions, to come to the aid of newspapers.