"Harvard and Stanford Nearly Make Up Financial Crisis Losses" (CalPERS still playing catch up)

All three had "long only" commodities portfolios based on the GSCI but CalPERS really believed the fast talking Goldman salesman and bought the whole program including swaps that allowed them to piggy-back on Goldman's "commercial" status and thus avoid position limits.

From peHUB:

Harvard and Stanford, two of the nation’s richest universities, say that endowment returns for fiscal 2011 brought them to within striking distance of where they stood before the financial crisis lopped off billions of investment value. 


The Harvard Management Company, which manages the university’s endowment, reported a gain of 21.4 percent – or $4.4 billion – in fiscal 2011, which ended on June 30. That gain increased the size of Harvard’s endowment to $32 billion.

The gain, on top of fiscal 2010’s return of 11 percent, marks a strong reversal for the giant endowment, which plummeted 27 percent – or $11 billion – in fiscal 2009, from a pre-crisis peak of $36.9 billion in fiscal 2008. That leaves Harvard just $4.9 billion shy of where it was before the financial crisis.
Private equity was a strong component of Harvard’s strong performance. The university’s private equity program logged a 26.2 percent gain, which was still shy of returns earned by the university’s public equity program, which returned 28.3 percent....MORE

CalPERS assets under management topped out the month the DJIA hit it's all-time high, October 2007 at $260.6 billion.
By December 2008 that had fallen to $179.2 billion.
As of June 30, 2011 they had recovered to $237.5 billion

Watch out for those fast talkers.