One other note. Contrary to what you may have read from some DP members, there is NO content restriction for .EDUs. Technically, you can use it to sell vitamins or airline tickets, although it would be a terrible waste of a domain. The reason there is very little 'inappropriate' content on .EDUs (not counting student webpages, etc.) is that schools, including Harvards of the world, are allowed to have only 1 (!) .EDU domain. Some managed to register 2 prior to 2001, but those are exceptions. Hence, there are no spare .EDUs, and 99.9% of them are used as intended.
Also many porn and pills sites are spoiling the reputation of .edu as they can easily exploits these site to get backlinks.
I guess Xavier University got lucky then when they got both xu.edu and xavier.edu EduOrg, do you know if there are a lot of edu domain dropping? /Andreas
Andreas - .EDU domains don't drop. If the school does not (or forgets to) renew the domain, Educause will attempt to contact the school; if that fails, they will wait 6+ months before deleting the domain. At that point, it will be deleted from the registry for good and become available for registration to other accredited universities. Because of a post-2001 1 domain per school restriction, there are very few new .EDU registrations, which go to either newly established (newly accredited) schools or existing schools switching domains (e.g. Northwestern University: nwu.edu -> northwestern.edu) As I mentioned before, the only legal way for an individual to get .EDU is to acquire a small school, which closed its doors or never got off the ground because of funding and which owns a grandfathered .EDU (well, if you have several million $$ in the bank, you can also buy a small ongoing college).