Harvard's endowment plunges nearly 30 percent

Is this the best our esteemed national university could do?

"In navigating the past year's storm, we developed greater financial flexibility, strengthened our investment team, sharpened our focus and positioned both HMC and the endowment to be robust, steady and, importantly, poised to benefit from growth in the world's economies," Mendillo said in a statement.

Translation:

"As we were caught up in the group think of the investment world which left us overexposed, we got rid of bad investments and bought new investments at a higher price taking a huge loss, fired 275 people to save money, panicked about the ugly balance sheet and reacted by placing too much of our portfolio in riskier global stocks to try and make up our losses."

I love corporate doublespeak.