This week, Daily reporters Andy Kroll and Kyle Swanson will be taking readers' questions about their four-part series on the University of Michigan's endowment. Submit your question as a comment below, and they will answer as many of your questions as possible in the space below.

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ANDY: Welcome to the Q & A portion of the Daily's "The Anatomy of an Endowment" series. This is Andy Kroll, the Daily's Investigative Editor . I thought I'd lead off this forum by talking about some of the questions I had as I began the series and how I set out to answer them.

For anyone who's watched as appropriations funding from the state government has stagnated in recent years (a decrease of almost $97 million since the 2002 fiscal year when measured for inflation), it's evident that something has had to fill the funding hole left behind. That's where the endowment comes in, playing an ever-larger role in the University's daily operations and future success.

But what exactly is the endowment? What is it comprised of? Who are the people, offices and organizations that together manage it and grow it? These are among the questions I set out to answer last fall when I began the reporting for the series.

I met with University President Mary Sue Coleman several times; picked the brain of Chief Investment Officer Erik Lundberg on multiple different occasions about all things related to the endowment (and profiled him in the process); and interviewed the Provost, members of the Investment Advisory Committee and the Chief Financial Officer Timothy Slottow, among others.

In today's story, "The multi-billion-dollar backbone," I tried to dissect and describe the endowment's composition as clearly and thoroughly as possible. And Daily reporter Kyle Swanson and I will try to do the same in the series' remaining three stories. However, there will surely be questions that arise among our readers, so don't hesitate to post those questions on this forum. Kyle and I will do our best to answer as clearly and completely as we can.

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READER QUESTION:Here's a question posed by reader Capital Gains Taxes:
"I would also recommend to ask some questions about the taxing of university endowments' capital gains. This seems to be a point of potential conflict between states and universities (has been heated in Mass.). Obviously, capital gains taxes also affect investment strategies. Does our nominally 'public' status factor differently in this tax debate?"

ANDY: Thanks for your question, Capital Gains Taxes. The University of Michigan's public status means the returns U-M's endowment earns on its investments are not taxed. As Bob Zemsky wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education in January 2008:

"...remember that gifts to endowments reduce the taxes the benefactors pay and the returns endowments earn on their investments are tax free. Simply put, one of the reasons these institutions have so much money to invest is that they didn’t pay taxes on the money they had previously earned."

-- Andy Kroll, Daily Investigative Editor"

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