Shale-gas fracking is sure to bring all kinds of changes to Ohio. But what administrators and trustees at Ohio University are concerned about at the moment is who will control whether their land gets fracked. In years past, individual boards of trustees, for the most part, controlled the land at the state's colleges and universities. But a new law…

Colleges have always struggled with deferred maintenance, but several factors might make that struggle especially challenging in the future. Colleges grew rapidly in the postwar years and have a generation of 1960s or 1970s buildings that need major repair or replacement. In the past 10 years, colleges went through another building boom, adding to…