Those tax-exempt universities and colleges have collectively enormous endowment funds (Harvard's alone is $32.7 billion as of 30 June 2013), and enough of it is invested in firms such as Exxon and Peabody so that finally there will be a really powerful economic pressure that will keep this world under the 2-degree Centigrade, or 5-degree Fahrenheit, limit.
This will be using the combination of democratic public pressure and of the natural economic forces of the markets, to save the world. And that's something that is of both economic and public interest
Even if universities and colleges don't deserve their tax-exempt status and never did, the response to this ethical challenge that Harvard (and Brown) offered was so psychopathic as to warrant a clear rejection from the public, because all of us suffer the consequences of it. It is unacceptable.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST'S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
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