Links for 2010-05-22

“High-risk, high-reward policies heavily influenced by Wall Street helped some college endowments grow to several times their original sizes, but they also did damage to employees, local communities and the global financial system, a new assessment of investment practices at Harvard University and five other New England institutions suggests.

The development since the 1970s of the “endowment model of investing” may have paid off for many years, but in a report released Thursday, the Center for Social Philanthropy at Boston’s Tellus Institute concludes that the model is “broken.” Moving forward, the report said, the investment strategies of nonprofit higher education need to be reformed to take into account sustainability and social responsibility, and to eschew the great risks that contributed to the dramatic damage now reaching far beyond the gates of academe.”

“[O]ne of the things I kept thinking about during [an ER visit] was a familiar theme for me, which is the ongoing problem of the professions. Academia and medicine, it seems to me, share some similar problems. Academia’s issues I see from the professional’s side, medicine’s problems from the perspective of the clientele. The first perspective tends to put me in the position of an apologist, the second as accuser. Maybe between the two some kind of insight is possible, though when I add it all up, I’m left with the sense that many modern professions are simultaneously indispensible, a highwater mark of social progress and hopelessly screwed up in ways that can’t really be fixed by outsiders or insiders. “

Charming little Italian cartoon about particle physics.