I could you send here; or I could send you here.
But the title of this post, a little phrase taken from Lynn O’Shaughnessy’s MoneyWatch column, is really all you need.
Harvard’s many-splendor’d fuck-ups, revealed with its recent release of its annual financial report, are the talk of the town.
The same alumni who a few years ago saw something not quite right about employees of a non-profit receiving thirty million dollars a year now wonder about clawbacks from the compensation of the current group of inept managers. These alumni have written a letter to Harvard’s president. Here are some excerpts:
Since the university is legally required to release the compensation of its highest-paid employees, clawbacks from that compensation should be made public as well… The story of the endowment is one part of a larger problem of investment practices that have brought down much of the world economy. We would like to see Harvard take a lead in addressing these problems… The annual report gives no indication that the compensation system will be seriously re-examined, let alone changed. We continued to believe that no Harvard employee should earn more annually than the President of the University and that multi-million dollar bonuses are inappropriate in non-profit institutions.
October 21st, 2009 at 7:28AM
They’d better watch out, or the president of Harvard could be making $30 million in a few years.
October 21st, 2009 at 9:15AM
But the more we learn, the more it appears that the fuck-ups weren’t so much the highly paid money managers (a lot of the endowment losses were paper losses on long-term investments, as the fairly detailed Yale report reveals). The biggest problems arose because the treasurer and other administrators chose to put operating funds at risk. What they did may fairly be called "getting greedy," but they weren’t paid $30 million to do it.