Practically every major endowment fund imitated their construct these past few years.
But unlike the Gates Foundation, Harvard isn't legally required to spend 5percentt of its endowment every year.
Every year, the endowment agency bestows the fellowships, which carry a $25,000 award, on masters of folk and traditional art forms, including some obscure crafts.
Also important, Ms. Richardson convinced the group that she had innovative ideas about fund-raising for Yaddo, which must supplement its endowment every year.
To replicate the program in New York City, to cover the college tuition of all 52,000 students who graduate from the nation's largest school system every year, an endowment of something like $20 billion would be needed, according to Keith Luke, at the Connecticut-based Commonfund, which manages $25 billion in assets for nonprofit institutions.
Unlike most museums, which must constantly raise money and which have been running blockbuster exhibitions to bring in revenue-raising crowds of T-shirt-buying tourists, the Getty's biggest financial problem is that it must spend 4.24percentt of its huge endowment every year to maintain its tax-exempt status as a charitable trust.
Every mutual fund, endowment and family office drank Greenberg's Kool-Aid, and trusted whatever he told them.
In fact, it seems Harvard lost more last year than the total value of every other university endowment in the world with the exception of Yale, Princeton and Stanford.
At Middlebury College, a school that earned an "A" on the 2009 "College Sustainability Report Card" in every category but "endowment transparency," senior Nate Blumenshine planned a spur of the moment "Freeze on Coal" to launch a campaign compelling the administration to divest from coal.
More recently, the college ran multimillion-dollar deficits every year, with its endowment bottoming out at $100 million after Sept. 11.
