ai5000 Magazine

Protect. Perform. Provide.

What is happening at the Wake Forest endowment also is happening in Boston, New Haven, Palo Alto, and Philadelphia and Ithaca. The age of the outsized and leveraged endowment return is over. Instead, Wake Forest’s Jim Dunn’s ethos will be echoed around the endowment space: protect, perform, provide. Ignoring the raison d’être of university capital—to, in times both good and bad, provide enough money to build the school’s hard and soft assets—will no longer be acceptable. Building walls between endowment investment professionals and university faculty will no longer suffice. What will suffice—be required, even—is a return to basics. Jim Dunn surely is. Others would be well advised to follow.