several years ago i began reading articles describing how well  universties were investing their money.  I could not figure ouy how they were able to achieve such lofty returns while I as an unsophisticted investor could never achieve their gains. And now I know why I will continue to invest with local banks or major mutual fund companies.

Making money by leveraging in an up market is easy--any bright high school student can do it--I know because I did,35 years ago, in a class exercise about the 1920s stock market.  The problem is that it is gambling (on a continued rising market) and the fund managers were never given the shareholder's OK to gamble like that.  Same with the bankers who are now being given BILLIONS of taxpayer's money to try to revive the corpse they slaughtered.  Harvard fund managers are in that same team of "experts".

Gersh

I don't believe that 36 Billion was all donated to Harvard. A lot of it came from growth of the fund in the previous years. So they lose a little bit of that.

Big Deal. The point is when money is sitting around and doing nothing for the

main purpose of the establishment, it does not matter if it is even there or not.

22% decline is better than the 40% or more that most mutual funds suffered.