As for Mr. Swensen, it’s an environment that brings together two things he loves: thinking about investments and teaching other people how to think about them. “They are twin passions of mine,” he said during a recent interview in his sun-filled corner office at the endowment’s headquarters on Yale’s New Haven campus. Certainly no school has incubated as many endowment managers as Yale.

Mr. Swensen is legendary in the rarefied world of endowment management. He has pioneered an investment strategy that expanded Yale’s portfolio from a plain-vanilla mix of stocks and bonds to substantial holdings in real estate, private equity and venture capital, along with other alternatives. Until then, the typical endowment was far more conservative.

And through his graduates, his investment style has spread to the nation’s prominent schools and foundations. Today, Mr. Swensen and former protégés oversee nearly $100 billion in endowment money for schools including M.I.T., Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania, Bowdoin, Wesleyan and Princeton (which Mr. Golden manages). Other alumni are running the Rockefeller Foundation and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and working at the YMCA Retirement Fund and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In an era when it is routine for money managers to elbow their way into the public consciousness — populating the news channels, burnishing their images — Mr. Swensen has largely stayed away from the spotlight, aside from writing a book, “Pioneering Portfolio Management.” Yet he is one of the most influential people in a generation that has seen endowments grow tremendously in importance at premier institutions. Yale’s endowment now provides 33 percent of the school’s budget, compared with 10 percent in 1985.

In a series of extended interviews, he and more than a half-dozen of his investment-office veterans discussed his management style — where they agree and disagree. Along the way Mr. Swensen gave his views on things as diverse as the pharmaceutical company Valeant — which “didn’t even have the fig leaf of R.&D. expenditures,” he said, to justify increasing its drug prices dramatically — to his toughest year, fiscal 2009, when his fund plummeted 24.6 percent during the economic meltdown.