How Yale Got Crazy Rich!

David Swensen built a $29 billion fortune for his university and revolutionized investing. What’s wrong with that?

- Drake Bennett, Janet Lorin, and Michael McDonald Photograph by Jamie Chung

On a Tuesday in early April, David Swensen sat onstage in a gradually filling lecture hall. Sunlight slanted through a Tiffany stained-glass window of angels personifying various pursuits of the mind. Outside, tour groups moved along the paths of Yale’s Old Campus, spilling onto topsoil ventilated with small holes to speed the growth of the grass upon which undergrads would picturesquely recline in warmer weather.

Swensen is a legend at Yale, and its highest-paid employee. But he’s neither the university president nor the football coach. He’s the money manager who for 34 years has been in charge of the endowment—the multibillion-dollar pool of money, seeded and fed by donations, that comprises Yale’s fortune. It’s largely thanks to Swensen that the university can woo star scholars, that its admissions can be need-blind, its libraries and cafeterias staffed, its sports teams fielded, its grad students stipended, its antique windows tended, and its lawns aerated.

The afternoon’s event was a conversation on personal finance with NPR correspondent Chris Arnold. “This is my passion,” Swensen told the audience. He warned about how money managers can take advantage of their clients. “All of the ads that you see steer you in the wrong direction, because it’s ad money being spent by for-profit organizations.” In khakis, a button-down, and a fleece vest with a Y over his chest, Swensen at 65 is square-jawed, with a teenager’s gangly frame. Several years ago he began receiving treatment for cancer. Onstage, he moved with evident effort, and his speech was punctuated by pauses for breath.