Saw a seminar by Kelvin Newman where he gave 16 ways to get links from .edu domains.

1. Get in touch with bloggers. It is a good way to get links, and many blogs are hosted on university websites. Follow these blogs and keep in touch with them.
2. Give away discounts to students. Then ask colleges and universities to place a listing of these student discount. Works very well and often generates much more visitors!
3. Send press releases around where you also mention the university in a positive way. Many universities have PR departments and they will mention your press release in their press releases.
4. Participate in projects and offers internships and graduate opportunities. Not only do you get cheap labor, but it also provides links to your site, since these vacancies are posted on the university websites.
5. Sponsor an event for students. It costs almost nothing but provides a lot of links!
6. Talk about career paths at colleges and universities. Give a guest lecture. This will be blogged about on the website and by students.
7. Advertise your vacancies on the university job board. Not just good for links!
8. Encourage students to analyze your business and make sure your business is part of a case study.
9. Make sure that you will be boycotted! Do something extreme. Even negative publicity can bring backlinks.
10. Launch a community on your website about a specific topic. Many government websites link to community websites in which certain groups of people are members.
11. Start a website for charity. If there are no commercial interests, it will grow fast and you control the backlinks to your site.
12. Several universities have their own directories. It is very hard to get listed on these directories, but it's worth a try.
13. Organise a fun night or a specific event. A local event can work very well. Many government websites are willing to link to such events.
14. Start a political campaign. This often creates a lot of extra attention.
15. Use your own job site to get links. Job Web sites grow quickly because the government is willing to link to these websites.
16. Go run for parliament / charity. It'll get you a whole bunch of backlinks.

Nice list with some very good ideas. Be aware that Google's Matt Cutts swears that .gov or .edu sites don't carry any extra weight...

Matt Cutts:

i've never considered whether links from a .gov site might be more valuable.. i see from this and Lorenz' response that the advantage is only because they, by their nature get a lot more hits...

Nice list. However, some of the steps were quite an expensive venture, especially if the website is nothing more than a small site or a blog. Quite creative though, I must admit.