"We have a government that has been taken over by the fossil-fuel industry, so we're going to pressure the fossil-fuel industry itself," said Chloe Maxmin, a junior leading Divest Harvard. She added that students, spurred by forecasts of dire climate change in "a time frame well within my generation's lifetime," have organized divestment groups on about 400 campuses. Eight small colleges and nearly two dozen towns and cities have pledged to sell their shares in fossil-fuel firms. Yet many academic institutions are rejecting the divestment argument, including Harvard and Middlebury College, home to climate activist and professor Bill McKibben. They say that divesting shares of fossil-fuel companies would politicize universities and have little-to-no impact on the companies, or on society's reliance on fossil fuels. On Tuesday, D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D) will hold a hearing on the Fossil Fuel Divestment Act of 2013, which would direct the District's retirement board and chief financial officer to sell off holdings that the District's retirement funds and Health Annuity Trust have in the 200 publicly traded companies with the largest reserves of fossil fuels. "We need to look at different ways we can positively affect climate change," Mendelson said, but added, "I certainly don't want to hurt the retirement program." He said that fossil-fuel companies make up "a fraction of 1 percent" of the retirement fund's holdings. Mendelson is sponsoring the bill along with council members Jack Evans (D-Ward 2), David Grosso (I-At Large), Muriel Bowser (D-Ward 4) and Tommy Wells (D- Ward 6). Mendelson owns $40,700 of Chevron stock and $154,400 of Exxon Mobil stock, according to his 2012 disclosure forms. He said he inherited the shares from his late mother. Asked if he had considered selling them, he said, "I've given that some thought, but the issue before the council is the policy of the District government." Advocates of selling fossil-fuel stocks say the campaign rests in part on moral issues similar to divestment pushes of the past. In a Nov. 18 editorial, the Yale Daily News quoted the university's "Ethical Investor" guidelines, which support the sale of invesments causing "grave social injury." The paper said that the endowment sold off shares of companies operating in South Africa during the apartheid era and limited investment in Sudan in 2006 as fighting intensified in Darfur. Now, the paper said, "We are in a unique position to pioneer a new front on an existing powerful environmental movement." Maxmin said students want to treat fossil-fuel companies like tobacco companies, ostracizing them because they capi­tal­ize on businesses that have bad health effects.