Bernard L. Fulton started his teaching career in a two-room schoolhouse in his native Boone County, W.Va.

… Fulton … was still talking schools recently when he ate lunch with [the] Greenhill [School’s]headmaster. He built his reputation in Dallas, where, starting with a vision and a three-room building, he founded the Greenhill School in 1950.

Mr. Fulton, 99, died Sunday … at his Dallas home.

… Greenhill headmaster Scott Griggs said Mr. Fulton’s life mission was to create great educational opportunities for children.

“I had lunch with him two weeks ago, and he spent an hour and a half talking about schools, education, public schools and our challenges we have today,” Mr. Griggs said. “At the age of 99, he was still thinking about what we could do to improve upon education.”

Mr. Fulton was 8 when his father died of blood poisoning, a complication of a compound fracture he received in a railroad accident at his Boone County lumber company. The boy helped his mother raise his three younger siblings.

Mr. Fulton, a high school running back, declined football scholarships to Notre Dame and Princeton to attend Morris Harvey College, now the University of Charleston, in Charleston, W.Va., which was closer to his family…

This is one of my worst puns. It’s not as bad as this one in a Wall Street Journal headline — the article’s about credit-rating downgrades at universities —

BIG MOAN ON CAMPUS

— but it’s pretty bad.

A campus building in Chicago now bears the name of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate whose Solidarity movement in the ’80s helped trigger communism’s collapse.

Former Polish President Lech Walesa (LEHK vah-WEHN’-sah) spoke Friday at a ceremony at Northeastern Illinois University where the classroom building was named in his honor.

And yes, I’m only running this post to make Mr UD happy.

He’s Polish, in case you didn’t know.

My referral log tells me that many Vanderbilt people are reading UD on the insult of your university having rewarded a plagiarist with a medal and the keynote speech on Senior Class Day.

Know that you are not alone. When the University of Virginia gave her a high-profile appointment, people there were also outraged.

As Randy Newman reminds us, it’s a great big dirty world.

But it’s incredibly important to kick against that world. Keep it up.

“We must educate those who will lead the institutions that will serve as engines of prosperity in our economy. But we must also instill in them the importance of ensuring that these engines of prosperity are engines for all,” intoned then-President Larry Summers at a Harvard religious gathering.

But Summers’ own engine rides so high… the throttle on that thing… It’s like… here’s Larry on his prosperity engine:

Why is he riding so high?

According to the NYT, Larry Summers worked just one day a week while making $5.2 million in two years at hedge fund D.E. Shaw.

So let’s say he worked 100 days total, that’s $52,000 per day.

And assuming he worked about 12 hour days, that’s $4,333 per hour.

Ride ’em, cowboy! Hell, plenty to go around! With his common touch, Summers is just the man to ensure that America’s engines of prosperity are engines for all.

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Point of Clarification: Why only one day a week?

Because he was a full-time professor at Harvard at the same time.

… when she lived on Capitol Hill, died too soon.

But before he died, Judge Graae had a chance to do something brave and important.  He had the guts to put the DC housing authority in receivership, and many, many people benefited from this.

The drama at Clemson University, starring a retired French professor, is kind of like that.   John Bednar has obviously decided, at an advanced age, to do something brave and important.   He has very publicly accused the Clemson administration of serious corruption, and he continues to do so.

For this, he has been pilloried by Clemson’s leadership, and by many in the Clemson community.

We should all be so lucky.

UD salutes the young idealists featured in the three posts below. They are students at Harvard, the University of Minnesota, and George Washington University.

The words in my title come from Walt Whitman.