Jane MendilloJoins the Line of Former Harvard Endowment CEOs

哈佛管理公司的6月10日宣布总统兼首席执行官Jane Mendillo将在年底离开她的角色，使得投资管理世界的吸引力。那么为何不？HMC，其资产在2013年6月30日之前公开价值为327亿美元，监督全球最大的327亿美元大学捐赠。而且，42％的投资组合由120名投资专业人士在HMC的剑桥，马萨诸塞州，办公室，这是一个相当大的资产经理。

Like the proverbial 800-pound gorilla, when Harvard makes a move, the earth shakes. Although most educational endowments suffered losses in the financial crisis of 2008–’09, Harvard’s 27.3 percent fall made the biggest noise of all. That loss, which wiped out $10 billion of the university’s assets as of June 30, 2009, loomed larger than, say, Yale’s $5.6 billion loss or Princeton’s $3.7 billion drop.

It was into this devastation that Mendillo stepped when she took on the CEO role on July 1, 2008. To tackle the massive job of rebuilding the HMC portfolio, she brought with her six years’ experience building an investment office as CIO for the then–$1.5 billion Wellesley College endowment and 15 years at HMC prior to that overseeing external timberland and real estate managers and sitting on the internal equity and private equity management teams, among other tasks.

随着它的宣传声誉，哈佛大学禀赋始终引起关注。其捐赠管理是20世纪70年代初期成为投资办事处的首选，以确保至少对学校本身的独立感知。就其部分而言，耶鲁省捐赠亦于1973年兑换为投资管理公司，然后再次恢复传统捐赠办公室。

The investment office arrangement allowed Harvard to design a compensation system different from that of the university. That eventually backfired when questions arose from alumni and others about compensation levels in the early 2000s that were approaching and passing the $10 million mark for some investment professionals. The CEO at the time, Jack Meyer, was essentially managing 85 percent of the endowment assets as a hedge fund, including short positions. The criticism over compensation led to the end of the 15-year Meyer era and its 15.9 percent annualized performance.

The conundrum of paying investment professionals to scale in a university-owned investment office is a knotty issue at other endowment, foundation or even large pension fund offices. In January 2006 no less a personage than the revered Yale University CIO David Swensen challenged the salaries at HMC during a question-and-answer session at a conference sponsored by the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO). “I have long said that the structure of Harvard Management is inherently unstable,” Swensen said. “You can’t pay managers astronomical amounts of money because it tears at the fabric of [the university],” he concluded.

2005年迈耶曾经是佣金院长和洛克菲勒基金会的CIO，左边哈佛设立自己的波士顿对冲基金公司，Convexity Capital Management,哈佛受托人从资产管理世界中选择了一个新的首席执行官。Mohamed El-Erian在加利福尼亚州纽波特海滩的固定收入巨型太平洋投资管（PIMCO）上运行了六年的新兴市场投资组合。El-Erian的年度净回报率为20.1％，他管理的基金必须非常引人注目。

“我是如此意识到责任，”El-Erian告诉亚博赞助欧冠in 2005, speaking of his new role. “I know what a 1 percent difference in the endowment return makes in terms of the Harvard community’s ability to maintain its excellence.” El-Erian, who holds a Cambridge University undergrad degree coupled with a master’s and a Ph.D. in economics from Oxford, also knew that as the ultimate buyer he would have a front-row seat in assessing the asset management world.

“你可以看到数百个经理 - 两个管理你的钱和那些想要的人，”El-Erian告诉II。

但El-Erian的任期是简短的。2007年9月，他宣布了他要离开哈佛，并回到Pimco。门口为曼德罗作为首席执行官返回HMC，部分是首席执行官，部分原谅了她的前老板迈耶的建议。

与El-Erian的出发一样，面对不确定性和丰富的可能性，对门里的出口的原因进行猜测升级。关于HMC的同伴小组和投资和管理挑战的基金提供资金的理论比比皆是。HMC 2013年的2013年表现为11.5％，在每年的Nacubo-Commonfund禀赋研究中超过800所学校的平均水平为11.7％。它的五年回报率为1.7％，也低于其他11个其他常春藤联盟和类似学校。

Meyer argues that HMC is a more difficult place to work than other large endowments, foundations or pension funds. “It is constantly under intense scrutiny and intense competition,” he says. “Every fall it’s a three-month news story when they release the [performance] results.” Not every endowment watcher concurs. “I agree that the job of running a lot of money is pressure-filled,” says Charles Skorina, principal of his eponymous San Francisco executive search firm. “I don’t agree that Harvard has more pressure. You can’t tell me that Narv [N.P. Narvekar] at Columbia or [Andrew] Golden at Princeton doesn’t have board pressure.”

For long-time investors the landscape has changed. “Back in the 1990s there were $20 bills all over the sidewalk,” jokes Meyer. Assets classes like timber, which entered the HMC portfolio in 1997, and Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities routinely produced high returns. Meyer also believes that the portfolio’s sheer size makes it difficult to invest, which is due in part to the way the top private equity managers distribute capacity in their funds. For example, Harvard will get the same $15 million allotment that much smaller funds like Princeton and MIT receive, making the allocation less impactful. “When I was at Harvard, that was one of the key issues,” he says.

更多的被查的有效性nges Mendillo made to the portfolio and investment team. Like her compatriots at large schools like the universities of Chicago, Michigan and巴黎圣母院，Mendillo于2010年聘请了一名首席风险官，Neil Mason，以结束另一个金融危机。“大学的风险容忍是我们投资组合建设的关键组成部分，”她告诉亚博赞助欧冠在2011年初。去年，她宣布招聘了另一个新的风险官员Jake xia。批评者指出了这些人员的手指变化，包括来自私募股权团队的几个高调的退出。“像这样一个可见的地位一样，一个人，必然会引起一些批评，”Commonfund Institute，康涅狄格州禀赋和基金会的研究部门的董事总经理William Jarvis说。

In the end, it may be that Mendillo, like Meyer and El-Erian, has just had enough. “This job, heading a university endowment and producing extraordinary results, is much harder now than when I did it,” explains Meyer. “It’s much harder to add value than it was 15 years ago.”

Get more on捐赠和基础。在Twitter上关注弗朗斯丹麦@francesdenmark。