America’s fixation on celebrity has worked its way into academia.

While adding thousands of college records to the Muckety database recently, we couldn’t help but notice several star-studded boards.

One of the most blinding is at Vassar, where trustees include Meryl Streep and Lisa Kudrow, who are both alumnae and (despite Phoebe’s ditziness) brainiacs. The University of Southern California boasts Stephen Spielberg; Bennett College for Women has poet and Oprah pal Maya Angelou; and Gallaudet University has actress Marlee Matlin.

You have to admit that William Cunningham practices what he preaches.

He teaches a class in corporate governance at the University of Texas and sits on the boards of public companies that paid him a total of about $800,000 in stock and cash last year.

If the former chancellor of the University of Texas system lives in an Ivory Tower, it is firmly anchored in a very nice real-world neighborhood.

Cunningham, 63, is a director of Southwest Airlines, Lincoln National Corporation, Introgen Therapeutics, Inc., LIN Television and Hayes Lemmerz International Inc.

The No Child Left Behind act is a bonanza for private tutoring firms, including Sylvan Learning.

Under the act’s provisions, students enrolled in schools judged to be failing are entitled to free tutoring, paid for by taxpayers. The costs total $2.5 billion annually, according to U.S. News and World Report.

Tutoring companies contract with individual states and school districts. Sylvan provides such tutoring at about half of its 1,200 U.S. locations, according to Tabatha Sweeney-Gehrt, Sylvan’s director of new business development. At some centers, she says, business has doubled because of the service.

Despite losing to Microsoft in its bid for a piece of Facebook, Google isn’t giving up on social networks.

The behemoth of search is partnering with other tech companies and social networks to develop a competing approach called OpenSocial. The open-source technology will enable developers to write applications that can be used on many sites, including partners in the project, such as LinkedInand Friendster.

In 1961, A&P supermarket heir Marie Robertson and her husband, Charles, gave $35 million in stock to Princeton University for its Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

Today, the gift is worth more than $880 million.

But the university and the descendants of the couple have spent millions in legal costs in a years-long fight over how the money should be used.

New York City’s ambitious charter school initiative gets a new director this month in Michael Thomas Duffy, fresh from a successful run in Roxbury, Mass.

The city has about 60 charter schools, but Mayor Michael Bloomberg has said he wants 100 by the time he leaves office in 2009. So Duffy has a big goal to meet.