Art of the Deal: How Do Universities Pay for All That ‘Goodness’?
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Do they have ethical investing standards or is return on investment the only concern? Is it real money? If a big chunk of it evaporates, is the University too poor to pay its workers?1 Do portfolio managers have to give back $Multi-million commissions?2
Should it be that way?
The Harvard Student Labor Action Movement
and
The Yale Responsible Endowment Project
have looked into the matter and are looking for people interested in furthering the project.
Keynote Session: Saturday February 7th Emerson Hall 305
7:00-8:30 PM How University Endowments are Managed.
Full Day Session: Sunday February 8th Ticknor Lounge, Boyleston Hall
10:00-5:00 PM Stay tuned for schedule.3
1Harvard Administrations campaign to break the Unions was in full swing when the Progressive Student Labor Movement was active 1996-2001. The endowment at that time was booming at the time of the Mass Hall Sit In – Spring of 2001.
2In 2002, a group of alums in the investment industry complained about the super-sized compensation Harvard’s portfolio managers – most of them employees of Havard Management Corporation. The president of HMC, Jack Meyer, took a bunch of his people and a bunch of Harvard’s money off and formed their own investment company. They continued to rake in bales of hay, but ta-da they were not Harvard employees. The current HMC bunch raked in enough to rile the alums and with the “deleveraging” of the market demanded that they give it back.
3Both SLAM and YREP have nascent websites. YREP has theirs hosted on Blogger which is a wholly owned subsidiary of the near monopoly Google. SLAM, on the other hand, has a drupal site hosted by The Harvard Computer Society. Since Drupal is free software. it makes more sense to post the schedule on SLAM than YREP. GAME ON! 🙂
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- Better than bailout.
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- The Vagina Monologues: V-Day 2009
