The Investors' Club: How the University of California Regents Spin Public Money into Private Profit
The changes can be traced to 2003, when regents Gerald Parsky, Richard C. Blum, and Paul Wachter – all financiers by trade – took control of UC’s investment strategy… Bypassing the university treasurer’s in-house investment specialists, the regents investment committee hired private managers to handle many of these new kinds of less-regulated transactions. This action theoretically placed some distance between the personal financial holdings of regents and the investments made on behalf of the UC endowment and retirement funds. But it also served to increase management costs, and to limit the transparency around UC’s investments, since these "external" managers are not subject to the same public disclosure laws that apply to university operations. Unfortunately, many of these deals, while potentially lucrative, have lost significant amounts of money for UC’s retirement and endowment funds
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by Peter Byrne, The Berkeley Daily Planet.