这么久，伊萨卡。
In late September officials at Cornell University announced that the upstate New York school’s Office of University Investments will move to New York City by late 2017. The move, approved by the board of trustees’ investment committee earlier in the month, will follow an increasingly popular path taken by schools located far from major financial centers — among them, Williams, Dartmouth and Bowdoin Colleges.
Cornell CIO Kenneth Miranda, who took the reins on July 1, gives the impending relocation his full support, noting in the university’s announcement that “the full merits will take time to achieve, but the decision is extremely supportive of the goals of the office.” Cornell has already established a New York presence with the Weill Cornell Medical School and the anticipated 2017 opening of the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech engineering school.
It is difficult to find an endowment official who does not support establishing an investment office closer to the global financial action. “I don’t even think about it,” says Collette Chilton, CIO of Williams College, who spends most of her time in a Boston office rather than on the bucolic Berkshires campus in Williamstown, Massachusetts. A veteran of remote work even before her 2006 hiring by the school, Chilton had a Boston office as CIO of Lucent Technologies, a telecommunications company located in western New Jersey.
As Chilton and others can attest, the move to a financial center affords an investment office access to a broader and deeper pool of professional talent. A New York or Boston location also brings allocators closer to asset managers, who can be quite reluctant to travel many hours to a campus location in the boondocks. A third advantage is proximity to industry conferences and asset manager–client events. Quick access to an airport is also important. Simply put, “the purpose of an investment office is to make money,” says Charles Skorina, an investment office search consultant in San Francisco. “Where can you best make money?”
Cornell may be late to the endowment office migration trend, judging at least in part by the school’s revolving door, which has seen four CIOs pass through in a decade. The $6.1 billion fund’s dismal –3.3 percent return for the year ended June 30, compared with the –1.1 percent median return for all endowments with more than $500 million in assets in the Wilshire Trust Universe Comparison Service, does not hurt in making the case for a move.
Chilton, who reports to Williams president Adam Falk and maintains an office on campus, returns there for weekly senior staff meetings when she isn’t on one of her frequent road trips to visit asset managers. The decision to locate the college’s new investment office in either Boston or New York had already been made by trustees in 2006, when Chilton was hired after a search, she explains. Today she oversees $2.3 billion with the help of two senior investment staff and three analysts; her team expands in the summer with student interns.
缅因州不伦瑞克比威廉斯敦更远离文明。因此，四年前的Paula Volent，Bowdoin College的Cio毫无疑问，现在拥有13.4亿美元的资产，监督学校投资办公室到纽约市的搬迁。2000年7月在耶鲁斯投资办公室的投资作用录得志愿者在Bowdoin开始了类似的投资办事处。此前，CIO的职责是财务主任的一部分。“投资组合并不像现在一样复杂 - 或者像复杂一样复杂，”志愿者解释。随着艰难的2015年 - 16财年同行，Bowdoin发现本身在负面领土中报告，返回-1.4％。
Over time, “we looked at different models,” Volent says. “We had turnover because people wanted to enlarge their careers.” Like Chilton, Volent established a student internship program on campus. “My mission is to work for the college, so I need to have a real presence. You need to be near it,” she asserts, adding that this philosophy was expounded by her mentor,David Swensen.
在远程投资办公室的运营中可能出现紧张局势。康涅狄格州康涅狄格州斯坦福德的威尔银行合作伙伴的搜索顾问和校长乔治·威尔博克斯说，捐赠和基础办公室非常努力地抵达其使命。“一些投资专业人员宁愿在“更柔软”的环境中筹集家庭。“每一个地点都呈现出挑战，”威尔银行竞争。
So it’s no surprise that the Bowdoin investment office has split its functions between Maine and New York. In the New York office, on Park Avenue and 54th Street, at the epicenter of asset management, three investment professionals work alongside the CIO. Although the urban office allows the school’s president to make use of the conference room, as well as hire a summer intern, most of the operations team (plus a director of research) is in Maine. Come summer the CIO and her investment staff head north to enjoy the country life back on campus.
For now it remains to be seen how much time Cornell’s Miranda and his team will spend in New York. We do hear that summers in Ithaca are “gorge-ous.”