Harvard PE team avoids axe

The management company of the US's largest university endowment has been an active seller on the secondaries market in recent years.

Harvard Management Company (HMC), which operates the US’s largest university endowment, will keep its private equity managers on staff amid a mass departure of internal managers, sister publication pfm understands.

The private equity group will form part of a new generalist investment management team at HMC, headed by recently hired managing directors Vir Dholabai, Adam Goldstein and Charlie Saravia.

Rick Slocum will join the team as chief investment officer from March. He was chief investment officer at The Johnson Company, a large single-family office in New York. Dholabai, Goldstein and Saravia will start at the end of January.

The investor’s real estate group will spin out to manage investments externally, while the hedge fund investment team will leave at the end of the 2017 fiscal year.

The move will roughly halve HMC’s 230 headcount.

HMC has been an active seller on the secondaries market in previous years, bringing large portfolios to market. In 2015 it attempted to sell about $1 billion worth of real estate stakes and had sold about half of this by August of the same year, as Secondaries Investor reported.

The management company has $35.7 billion in assets under management, according to PEI data. It was founded in 1974 to manage the Harvard University’s endowment, pension assets, working capital, and deferred giving accounts.