Yale Searches for CIO With Firm That Assisted Harvard, Stanford
Yale Searches for CIO With Firm That Assisted Harvard, Stanford
(Bloomberg) -- Yale University has tapped the same search firm that helped Harvard and Stanford find their endowment chiefs, as the school looks for a successor to its longtime chief investment officer, David Swensen, who died in May.
Yale hired New York-based David Barrett Partners, according to a person familiar with the matter. The firm recently conducted a search for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which named its new CIO in June and had $21.2 billion of assets at the end of fiscal 2020. Yale has given little indication of how long it will take to find Swensen’s successor since appointing Alex Banker to run the fund on an interim basis in May.
Yale declined to comment, as did the search firm.
Swensen, who built up Yale’s endowment to $31.2 billion as of June 2020, was famous for training endowment leaders who left to run funds at peer schools, making the search to find his successor particularly intriguing among those involved in higher-education money management. The next generation of his proteges include Seth Alexander at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Robert Wallace at Stanford and Peter Ammon at the University of Pennsylvania.
Yale’s endowment is the second-richest among private U.S. universities, behind Harvard’s $41.9 billion war chest and just ahead of Stanford’s $30.3 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg as of June 2020. Colleges are expected to release their returns through last month in the fall.
Several of the wealthiest universities have turned over CIOs recently, including Columbia, Northwestern and Rockefeller, as well as Bowdoin College. The University of Chicago, with a $10 billion fund, is also seeking a new endowment chief.
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