Before the completion of Harvard's massive Capital Campaign took center stage last week, the University's fundraising machine released a bit of bad news.

Harvard's endowment failed to reach its targets for growth in fiscal 1999, the University said last month.

Harvard's endowment ended last fiscal year--which began July 1, 1998--seven percentage points below targets set at the beginning of the year. It was the first time in six years that University fell below its targets for financial growth.

Its growth rate of 12.2 percent was down from Harvard's average of 20.1 percent over the last five years. But the world's richest university isn't hitting the panic button yet.

First of all, at $14.4 billion the University's endowment is nearly double that of its closest competitors--including the University of Texas system and Yale University.

And part of Harvard's problem last year was that it simply had too much money. Venture capital firms, which returned some of the highest profits for investors last year, often cap the amount any one institution can invest in them.

So Harvard was stymied from investing as large a percentage of its billions as it would have liked in this area, while other schools with less to spend got proportionally more of their money into venture capital.

But even so, University investors say they're confident of increasing returns on the endowment down the road, through investments in uncapped second-tier venture capital firms.