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tions, it needs to allocate to many managers. It currently allocates to 20. Stanford University currently allocates to 18. In contrast, Wesleyan University allocates to seven managers, while Vassar College currently allocates to five.

One endowment focused on absolute return strategies where they earn premium for providing liquidity to the market with regard to illiquid investments—market neutral, event arbitrage, fixed income arbitrage, and distressed.

The other three endowments used various strategies. In each of these three cases, equity long/short was a preferred strategy. Interestingly, none of the same managers were used in this category.

The various other strategies used by the three endowments included multistrategy, fund of funds, global macro/opportunistic equity, event arbitrage, distressed, and absolute return.

Only one of the four endowments was a proponent of the fund of funds approach, as one of its five allocations was to a fund of funds. Due to some internal problems it had on rebalancing, the endowment felt the fund of funds route for its core investments could make sense and impose some discipline.

No uniformity existed on the benchmarks used to evaluate returns. For example, UNC used the Russell 3000 and MSCI EAFE (Morgan Stanley Capital International Europe, Australasia, Far East index) to evaluate long/short hedge fund managers. It used the MSCI World Index to measure opportunistic hedge fund managers and inflation plus 8 percent for absolute return managers.

On the other hand, Vassar College used a flat 13 percent benchmark, and Wesleyan University, while not yet certain of the benchmark to use, compared managers against their peers.

The University of North Carolina and Vassar College both had allocations to Tiger Management. Their experiences in that situation were dif-