Today’s TImes has a piece about how the economic slump is putting pressure on town-gown relations across the US, with a particular emphasis on Harvard.

The rats are out in spades this spring in North Allston, a gritty neighborhood wedged between the Charles River and the Massachusetts Turnpike, and residents are blaming Harvard.

Etc. The article actually says nothing that you wouldn’t learn from reading the Crimson. (Pretty lame, actually.) And honestly, one wonders if those rats are really “out in spades” this spring, or if that isn’t just a little bit of pro-Allston rhetoric that the reporter took at face value.

Another university facing this problem is Brown. The mayor of Providence wants to charge Brown students a $150 “municipal impact fee” per semester. This is a dumb idea, for lots of reasons, foremost among them being that if you took Brown out of Providence, why the hell else would anyone go there?

One university that, in the past, would almost certainly have been mentioned in this context but is entirely absent from the article: Yale.

You have to give Yale president Rick Levin, who just underwent surgery for prostate cancer, much of the credit for that.