Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Hard times.

Wow. I guess those rumors about Harvard getting burned playing hedge fund games are true. They're putting in place a staff hiring freeze and getting ready to cancel faculty searches. Steps like that aren't surprising at, e.g., public universities in states hit hard by the housing crunch or ensuing economic crisis, but for a university with an endowment bigger than the GDP of some countries, this seems rather drastic. Still, it's hard to have too much sympathy for them, since their endowment is coming off a high of nearly $37B.

3 comments:

Ms.PhD said...

LOL! I missed this in the news.

Anything that hurts Hahvahd, pleases me. Even hiring freezes.

FWIW, I also saw your name in Nature today in the journal club section. I was like, Hey! I read his blog!

Kind of cool, really.

Douglas Natelson said...

Hi, Ms. Phd - thanks, and Happy Thanksgiving. Yeah, as a Princeton undergrad, I was trained at an early age to take joy in Hahvahd's problems.

Anonymous said...

Financial advisors are bunko artists and incompetents. Call in the herd from Harvard Business School! Oh, wait... Call in the herd from Stanford Business School? Does any non-diverse residue remain that can write a real world budget?