REWARDING FAILURE AT HARVARD'S ENDOWMENT

摘要

Each spring a familiar ritual plays out at Harvard University. The school reveals how much its endowment's top investment managers were compensated, and asmall group of alumni and faculty complain about it (sometimes privately, sometimes to local media). It's usually a philosophical argument about how the money could be better spent on other things, or about the intrinsic offense of cutting larger checks to money managers than to educators. For a bunch of folks affiliated with Harvard, you'd think they could identify the more legitimate cause of protest: Harvard is guilty of overpaying its endowment managers because they haven't done a very good job. And it is hardly the only school deserving of such a scolding. In many cases the systems are rigged to reward just about any endowment manager who doesn't burn down the dining hall.