Academic

HARD TIMES AT HARVARD: ?Only a year ago, Harvard had a $36.9 billion endowment, the largest in acad?

By Glenn Reynolds

HARD TIMES AT HARVARD: “Only a year ago, Harvard had a $36.9 billion endowment, the largest in academia. Now that endowment has imploded, and the university faces the worst financial crisis in its 373-year history. Could the same lethal mix of uncurbed expansion, colossal debt, arrogance, and mismanagement that ravaged Wall Street bring down America?s most famous university? And how much of the turmoil is the fault of former Harvard president Larry Summers, now a top economic adviser to President Obama?” It’s a troubling story: “At some point in the last five years, the men and women who run Harvard convinced themselves that the endowment would grow at double-digit rates forever. If Harvard were a publicly traded company, those people would have been fired by now.”

Full post as published by Instapundit.com on July 24, 2009 (boomark / email).