(Screengrab via CNBC)
The professional aspirations of Ron Unz have run the gamut from an unsuccessful campaign for governor of California in 1994 to an entrepreneurial turn that saw him found Wall Street Analytics.
His conservative leanings make him perhaps an unlikely proponent of free college at Harvard, but he's proposing just that.
Unz is running for the Board of Overseers with four other alums — including Green Party presidential nominee Ralph Nader — on a ticket to eliminate undergraduate tuition.
Unz is the most outspoken of the bunch when describing his motivations for running for the board. He unapologetically calls attention to the fact that Harvard has a massive endowment yet enjoys a tax exemption as an educational institution.
Harvard's endowment at the end of last year was $37.6 billion, the largest university endowment in the world.
"It's sort of like if Goldman Sachs bought a community college and declared itself tax-exempt," Unz told Business Insider.
Unz's decision to run for the board and try to change Harvard's tuition policy developed slowly over a decade, he said. Unz graduated from Harvard in 1983, double majoring in physics and ancient history. Year after year following his graduation, he said, Harvard fund-raisers would visit him in Palo Alto, California, asking whether he was willing to donate money to the university.
(Flickr/Paul Lowry)
The library at Harvard's Adams House.
He engaged in friendly discussion with the fund-raisers, he said. But he always made the point that given Harvard's enormous endowment, he didn't think it made any sense for people to donate to the university.
He compared it to any other wealthy company.
"I use Google all the time, and I think Google's a great company and has great technology, but if Google asked me for a donation, I'd say Google has more money than I do," he told Business Insider.
He decided to run for the board last year on a platform of abolishing tuition at Harvard, a move he thinks would make the school more attractive to students from low-income families, increasing diversity. He said that in addition to racial diversity he's targeting other less talked about measures like geographic and socioeconomic diversity.
(Wikimedia Commons)
He's also aiming to bring more transparency to admissions at Harvard, claiming wealthy families can "buy their children a place at Harvard."
He calls it "the Harvard price" and says families with the right connections can give the university "a few million dollars" and gain access for their child into Harvard.
It's an allegation that is echoed in Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Daniel Golden's book, "The Price of Admission: How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges — and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates."