These are tough times for university endowments -- there’s the difficulty of producing consistent results; the questionable love of investments in hedge funds and private equity amid high fees and underperformance; and the challenge of having to respond to competing constituencies. These issues are not going away anytime soon. If anything, they are becoming more pronounced and complicated in a time of low interest rates and volatile markets.
In that context, this doesn’t come as shocking news: Harvard Management Corp., the entity that runs Harvard University’s endowment, is considering the sale of part of its private-equity investments.
