The article is all over the place, but I think the general gist is that hedge funds are too expensive, and part of a financial system that universities should be opposed to. It's lacking data to show that hedge funds have less returns than other vehicles, but this did stick out to me:

Consider the problem of conflict of interest on endowment boards of both public and private colleges. One 2011 survey showed that 56 percent of endowments allowed board members to do business with the university. In 2013, Dartmouth came under fire when it was revealed that some trustees—including Stephen F. Mandel Jr., who was both chairman of the board of trustees and head of the hedge fund Lone Pine Capital—also managed investments for the school. The trustees were blasted, in a widely cited open letter, for recycling a portion of their “sky high fees” back to the university as “donations” for which they were often rewarded by having a building named in their honor.

This issue alone should be the topic of the article. If board members are profiting from their position to grant contracts, etc., then this is plain old corruption. Of course, the universities might have the right to allow their board members to profit at the university's expense, but I doubt it's a practice that would survive much scrutiny.