Yale Gets $20 Million Gift Honoring Late Endowment Investment Chief
Amazingly this sort of thing is tax deductible. Yale got a donation to set up an institute to honor the guy who managed Yale's endowment. Research funded by this donation will presumably be about how to make Yale's endowment grow faster.
Yale Gets $20 Million Gift Honoring Late Endowment Investment Chief
Yale University received an anonymous $20 million gift to establish the Swensen Asset Management Institute honoring the legacy of its endowment’s late chief investment officer.
“David Swensen transformed the way Yale managed its endowment and completely changed the field of institutional investing,” university President Peter Salovey said Tuesday in a statement. The institute “will ensure future generations of leaders and investors can follow his example of outstanding investment performance, rigorous ethics, and open-hearted generosity.”
The $20 million will be used to set up a fund to support the institute, which will create an endowed professorship, as well as provide additional scholarship funding and programing. Yale School of Management finance professor Tobias J. Moskowitz was named the center’s inaugural director.
Read more: How David Swensen Made Yale Fabulously Rich
Swensen, who died of cancer in 2021 at age 67, transformed Yale’s endowment into one of the nation’s best performers through savvy investments. He was a pioneer in diversifying its portfolio — adding private equity, hedge funds and real estate. At the time of his death, Yale ranked first among its Ivy League peers over the preceding decade with a 10.9% average annual return, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.