DAMI Confronts Yale Following Illuminating Student Article About Lack of Diversity, Accountability in Investment Office
WASHINGTON, DC – Today, Diverse Asset Managers Initiative (DAMI) executive director Robert Raben sent a letter to Yale President Peter Salovey and Yale Chief Investment Officer Matthew Mendelsohn urging the Yale Investment Office to increase efforts to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion. The letter comes following a concerning article in the Yale Daily News about the lack of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the Investment Office.
“You provide diversity data in most other areas of University life — the student body, the faculty,” wrote Raben. “Your institution even used its voice in a recent Supreme Court case to argue that diversity improves outcomes. We believe it is also incumbent upon the Office to avail itself of the transparency that has so benefited the rest of the institution.The endowment with the most powerful trustees in the nation should have access to the best asset managers in the nation.”
“Yale is not alone here. Regrettably the school joins Princeton and Stanford in a terrible trio in diversity. It’s long past time the President and Trustees of these schools took the reins from their CIOs, whose disrespect of women and people of color is absurd,” added Raben.
A full copy of DAMI’s letter is available here.
Since 2014, DAMI has been a leader in the effort to improve diversity amongst asset managers in the financial services industry. In 2020, DAMI launched Endowment Watch, a national campaign calling on universities to be transparent and intentional about who exactly is managing their assets. DAMI has also worked closely with organizations to build a vibrant, coordinated effort to change the culture of the financial services industry as it relates to asset managers.
Earlier this year, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation released a comprehensive report on 16 major colleges’ and universities’ use of asset management firms owned by women and racial or ethnic minorities. Notably, 50 schools were asked to participate in the study, and the vast majority declined – including Yale.
Studies have shown that women and people of color perform at par, and sometimes better, than white men. The Knight Foundation, for example, released a study in 2019 that found that women and minority-owned mutual funds were overrepresented in the top quartile of performers. Multiple analyses from the National Association of Investment Companies reveal that diverse private equity firms consistently outperform benchmarks. The Kellogg Foundation, too, has found that a new diverse manager portfolio exceeded benchmarks. The list goes on.
In 2021, the Knight Foundation released a major study analyzing the diversity of the people managing assets for the nation’s top foundations. Among the 55 foundations that Knight asked to participate, 30 provided data -- an increase in participation from previous years. The study found an overall increase in foundations investing with diverse-owned firms.