So far, Harvard has not caved in, but the student activists pushing for the university to divest all holdings of fossil fuel stocks won’t stop. They keep demanding that the university take a stand against the destruction of the planet that they’re utterly certain will happen unless we stop using fossil fuels NOW.

In a sharp rejoinder on The Daily Signal, Alex Belica and David Kreutzer are mean old spoilsports and point out that even if Harvard and all other colleges divested their holdings, it would merely “make fossil-fuel investments a better deal for subsequent investors since divestment does not change the demand for nor profits of selling the fuels.” Right, and it doesn’t speak very well of the education kids are getting at Harvard that they can’t grasp that.

Then the authors make a cheeky suggestion. Adverting to the widespread notion that it’s better to “eat local,” they write, “If cutting carbon dioxide is so important that it justifies sacrificing choice and quality in food, why not for education as well? Perhaps it could be called the ‘Learn Local’ movement.”

Absolutely! Students who travel great distances to go to Harvard are making their carbon footprints bigger than necessary. They could enroll in a college or university close to home rather than Harvard. Doing that would do more to help save the planet than insisting that universities “play investment musical chairs.”

“Wait! But going to Harvard means a superior education — you can’t really ask us to give that up,” the students will say. Not so, argues Frank Bruni in his recent book Where You Go is Not Who You’ll Be, which I review on Minding the Campus. Bruni makes the argument strongly: going to a purportedly elite college or university is neither necessary nor sufficient for a good education, much less later success in life.

Of course, the number of students who decide to leave Harvard and continue their educations at schools like, oh, Appalachian State will probably be zero. As Belica and Kreutzer observe, “It’s usually a lot easier to tell someone else to solve a problem than to do it yourself.”