Campus Clips

Yale’s endowment earned a 3.4 percent return in the fiscal year that ended June 30—a year when Harvard, Stanford, and other peer schools posted negative returns. The total value of the endowment, after the year’s spending is taken into account, declined from $25.6 billion to $25.4 billion.

Yale, NYU, and MIT are targets of lawsuits filed in August over their employee retirement plans. The suits, brought by employees of each university (all represented by the same attorney), allege that the universities’ plans did not do enough to curb high fees, costing employees money. Yale vice president Mike Peel wrote in an e-mail to employees that the university believes the complaint is “without merit” and that Yale will “oppose this suit vigorously.”

The University’s semiannual report on sexual misconduct, released in August, had the highest number of complaints to date for the five years the reports have been compiled. The report listed 88 complaints of sexual assault, sexual harassment, intimate-partner violence, stalking, and similar activities between January 1 and June 30. The previous high was 78, in the second half of 2015.

You’ll soon hear more jazz coming out of Yale. The School of Music recently received an anonymous gift to support jazz studies, including the Yale Jazz Ensemble, an improvisation course, private lessons, and undergraduate jazz combos. The Jazz Ensemble, a largely undergraduate group that was on hiatus, will be reconstituted and open to all Yale students.

The Yale Athletics department apologized in October for the cover of the Yale-Dartmouth football program after critics said it included racist images. The cover displayed reproductions of past football programs, some of which featured cartoon stereotypes of Native Americans. (Dartmouth’s teams were known as the Indians until 1974.)