Radical change is coming to Harvard. Fewer professors, for one thing. Fewer teaching assistants, janitors and support staff. Shuttered libraries." The list goes on.

At Harvard! Which is, to quote a hedge fund manager who "counts Harvard among his investors," totally "fucked."

What went wrong, according to Munk? Ridiculous, ill-advised expansion in this decade, of 6.2 million square feet, at an outrageous, unbelievable cost of $4.3 billion. Also, their annual budget, which was $2.1 billion in 1998, was, ten years later, $3.5 billion. Spendy! Oh and also any student whose parents earn less than $180,000 a year pays no more than 10% of tuition.

Harvard's endowment was an astounding $36.9 billion one year ago. Its debt now is $6 billion, which, Munk calculates, means that Harvard must pay $517 million a year until 2038 to pay it off.

There is a barely-mentioned component of the piece, and it has to do with Edward Forst. Forst was, let's say, "graduated" from Goldman Sachs (which is to say, he went through a process of sudden promotion, with, most likely, a one-time extra-massive bonus, and then "left" the company). This is how Goldman Sachs moves on the people who need to be paid off for having done their heavy lifting-or how it gets rid of people it just doesn't want any more. Forst was elevated to co-head of the Investment Management Division at Goldman just back in November of 2007, and then left in 2008, "for" Harvard.

Forst's title at Harvard was executive vice president. His job was to "help supervise the $34.9 billion endowment," wrote Bloomberg News at the time-and he was also to sit on the board of the Harvard Management Company. Now, with the endowment in ruins, he will leave Harvard in a few weeks. Everyone left behind is looking for someone to blame; Forst is slinking out quietly after something like a year on the job.

Huh!

http://www.theawl.com/2009/07/harvard-totally-fucked-as-goldman-sachs-alum-flees