Milo Hess/Zuma
This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Campus organizers at three universities filed legal complaints on Monday arguing that their schools’ investments in planet-heating fossil fuels are illegal, the Guardian has learned.
The students from Columbia University, Tulane University, and the University of Virginia each wrote to the attorneys general of their respective states calling on them to scrutinize their universities’ investments. They accuse their universities of breaching the Uniform Prudent Management of Institutional Funds Act, a law adopted by 49 states that requires nonprofit institutions to consider their “charitable purposes” when investing, and exercise “prudence” and “loyalty.”
“[T]he privileges that Columbia enjoys as a non-profit institution come with the responsibility to ensure…