“Our choice is awkward and difficult. If we don’t like something that Hedge Fund X has money in, we have very few choices,” Daniel says. “If you walk away from someone who has terrific returns for Harvard, that’s not an easy decision to make. If you walk away from an investor like that, you don’t get back in.”

“We have to keep in mind our key mission here is to earn money for Harvard,” Meyer says.

Overall, Harvard’s model for socially responsible investing and openness is an industry leader, says Simon C. Billenness, a senior analyst at Trillium, the nation’s largest socially responsible investment firm.

But Griswold says that the Commonfund has seen a drop-off in shareholder responsibility issues in the 1990s, since no single issue dominates anymore, as apartheid did in the 1980s—now concerns are spread more widely over tobacco, alcohol, child and slave labor, and weapons production.

“There’s no one at the barricades right now,” Griswold says.

Plus, after a decade of mergers, more conglomerates operate subsidiaries in a wide variety of industries.

“Part of the problem is that there isn’t one single issue anymore to screen for,” Griswold says. “None of them are snow white, they’re more like the seven dwarfs.”

With globalization and consolidation likely to continue, HMC is unlikely to avoid controversy entirely—but the University seems just as likely to overlook the occasional blow-up as long as the money keeps coming in.

“For Harvard’s perspective, the most important thing has always been the highest rate of return,” Sperling says.

—Staff writer Garrett M. Graff can be reached at ggraff@fas.harvard.edu.