During his undergraduate years at Brown, Joshua Kennedy ’97 worked as a bartender at the then-student-run pub the Underground. After graduation, Kennedy worked on the news staff of the Wall Street Journal. Nearly three decades later, Kennedy is set to become the University’s next chief investment officer and help oversee the University’s $9.5 billion endowment.
Kennedy first joined the University’s investment office in 2016, and he has served as deputy chief investment officer since 2022. He will succeed current CIO Jane Dietze in January.
Drawn to Brown for its “spirit of intellectual freedom,” Kennedy said that he did not have much interest in finance as a student and instead concentrated in religious studies.
Kennedy saw his time at the WSJ as “kind of a second undergrad in the sense that I learned all about business, finance, basically everything the Wall Street Journal writes about,” Kennedy said. Following his time at the WSJ, Kennedy studied accounting and finance at the New York University Stern School of Business, where he earned his master’s of business administration.
“I’m kind of like an accidental financier,” he said in an interview with The Herald. “If I had done a job at Sports Illustrated instead of the Wall Street Journal, I might be doing something entirely different.”
Vice Chair of the Department of Economics Bradford Gibbs ’93 MA’18 attributed Kennedy’s “non-traditional background” in finance to the Open Curriculum. He added that Kennedy’s unconventional path makes him “a really impactful speaker as well as mentor for students contemplating a career in investment management.” Kennedy has come to speak at Gibbs’s finance classes on multiple occasions.
After attending Stern, Kennedy worked at Liberty Square Asset Management and later worked as a managing partner at Sonian Capital Management, a Boston-based global value manager.
When Kennedy met Dietze, the two initially discussed the University’s ability to invest in the investment partnership Kennedy was managing at the time. The conversation “turned from that to the prospect of joining Brown as an investment professional, which is an obviously fantastic opportunity,” he said.
He said that the department is “not likely to be dramatically different” amid the leadership transition. “I’ve learned this trade from Jane, and we have worked very well together.”
Kennedy also credited the investment office’s sustained success to proper governance, hard work, innovation and “a great deal of good fortune,” he said.
Gibbs noted that the University’s investment office has a “surprisingly large number of Brown graduates who share a sense of mission of Brown in doing what they do.”
“Josh is one of the most thoughtful and insightful people I know,” Managing Director of the Investment Office Peter Levine ’95 — who will take over as deputy CIO when Kennedy ascends to his new role — wrote in an email to The Herald. “He is an excellent learner, with highly developed observational and analytic skills that inform his deliberate approach to investing.”
Levine met Kennedy during Kennedy’s first year at Brown. Their spouses, both of whom also attended Brown, met in their first week at the University, and the two couples have remained friends since. Levine described Kennedy as “a great listener who welcomes debate and discussion.”
“These are key qualities for a CIO who has to evaluate a lot of dynamic and subjective information in order to manage Brown’s all-weather portfolio,” he added.
Gibbs said that Kennedy is a “WYSIWYG,” or a person with whom what you see is what you get. “He’s the real deal. We’re lucky to have him as a part of this community,” Gibbs added.
On campus, Kennedy is also a guitarist for Funkademic, a Rhode Island-based cover band. A few years ago, Kennedy wrote and performed personalized songs for a number of colleagues, which Levine said was a huge hit. “He knew the team so well he could riff about their individual strengths and occasional quirks,” Levine wrote. “That says a lot about Josh — he knows his team extraordinarily well and transformed that knowledge into something amazing and creative.”
“This is the dream job, so I feel very privileged that I get to do this for Brown,” Kennedy said. “This is where I’ve made my home,” he said.
Jeremiah Farr is a senior staff writer covering university hall and higher education.
