The latest cover of Harvard magazine is bedecked with the American flag being nibbled away at by worms, in illustration of a feature article on income inequality.

The authors of the piece plead with Americans, reports the New York Sun, to “fund higher education the way they chose to fund universal public high-school education early in the last century.” The Sun pulls Harvard up short:

if Harvard is so concerned about inequality, it could take its own $35 billion endowment and give it away to the thousands of other colleges that are poorer. Or it could lobby for government legislation to tax away its endowment and give it away to other colleges so that they all ended up with the same endowments … But Harvard will do no such thing.
Which is a good thing … [for] a little inequality now and then has its virtues. So long as there is equality of opportunity, inequality of outcome needn’t always be looked at as a worm eating into the fabric of America. It is more like one of the threads of freedom.

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