Cornell’s endowment remained flat in the first quarter of the 2011-2012 fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, despite significant declines in the stock market over the same period. At the same time, the University announced it would refinance its debt to mitigate concerns about the market’s volatility.

Cornell’s Senior Investment Officer John Regan announced his resignation earlier this month, fewer than two months after Chief Investment Officer Michael Abbott abruptly left the University for reasons that remain unclear.

The University announced Wednesday that its endowment climbed 19.3 percent in fiscal year 2011 as of April 30, its second consecutive annual gain.

Michael Abbott, Cornell’s chief investment officer, stepped down on Sunday. The reasons for his departure remain unclear.

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Cornell's decision to give former CIO James Walsh a $400,000 bonus in the same fiscal year that the University's endowment fell by one-quarter was not a good sign that Day Hall is reimagining its compensation policies.

The university announced yesterday that Chief Investment Officer James Walsh will be resigning at the end of this academic year. As Cornell begins the process of selecting a new person to manage its roughly $4 billion endowment, it should aim to find a qualified candidate with a sense of pragmatic conservatism and a strong commitment to endowment transparency.

The latter part of Walsh’s tenure, which began in 2006, has been marked by turbulent times for the University’s finances. Cornell’s endowment suffered a drastic loss of about 27 percent last fiscal year. During the same time period, endowments at colleges and universities across the country decreased by 18.7 percent on average, according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers.

The year was 2008 and Cornell was prospering. With the University safely past the halfway point in its $4 billion capital campaign and reporting double-digit returns on its endowment, top administrators were terming the era a “golden age” in higher education.

Little did Cornell — and the rest of the world — know what was in store next.

After a 26 percent decline in its endowment last fiscal year, Cornell has a lot of lost ground to recover. In the first two months of the current fiscal year, the University has been making substantial strides to even out its balance sheet, announcing a 6.2 percent rise in its overall investment performance.

Since reporting a 27 percent loss during the second half of 2008, the endowment rose 2 percent from January through June.

The endowment makes up $4 billion in the University’s $5.1 billion total investment at the end of the last fiscal year, which ended June 30. While the improvement in investment performance has brought more assets to the University, Cornell has taken substantial funds from the endowment in order to pay for operational costs.