Harvard University

September 11, 2009, The Wall Street Journal ­— It's a tie in the Harvard-Yale investment game. Both schools were thrown for colossal losses.

August 24, 2009, The Wall Street Journal — Jane Mendillo spent her first year as Harvard University's endowment chief contending with the worst financial crisis in generations. Now she is repositioning the U.S.'s largest endowment in light of hard lessons learned.

August 3, 2009, Barron's — BACK IN THE GLORY DAYS, WHEN Harvard University was firmly perched in the pantheon of top-performing endowment funds, its Harvard Management Co. routinely came in for criticism for giving its managers outsized compensation packages, as well as for following investment strategies that seemed more suitable to a hard-charging Wall Street firm than to a tax-exempt charity.

July 22, 2009, Bloomberg — Harvard University and Yale University are preparing for an extended period of austerity as U.S. colleges are forced to cut spending next year and beyond to offset the biggest investment losses since 1974.

April 22, 2009, The Wall Street Journal — For many years, the Harvard and Yale endowments performed brilliantly, far outpacing the major stock market averages. They grew and grew, and their strategies became widely popular among professional investors. Yale's lead money manager, David Swensen, became a kind of guru for endowment investing and published "Pioneering Portfolio Management" in 2000 to codify his insights. In 2005, he brought out "Unconventional Success," a popular book that tried to explain to individual investors how they could mimic aspects of his approach to managing Yale's money.

US colleges and universities lost nearly one-quarter of their endowments' worth in the first half of their fiscal year, forcing them to cut staff and budgets just like corporations hurt by the financial crisis.