Laurence Morse

Laurence Morse holds a B.A. in Economics from Howard University — the HBCU whose alumni network shaped both his and JoAnn Price's professional orientation — followed by a Master's and doctorate in Economics from Princeton University, and a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard University.¹ Where Price came to Fairview from institutional leadership at NAIC, Morse came from economic analysis: his training shaped Fairview's investment thesis and gave the firm's argument for minority managers the analytical language that institutional allocators required.

The core Fairview thesis — developed with Price — is what they called the Emerging Domestic Markets (EDM) framework: minority-owned and women-owned PE and VC funds were systematically undercapitalized not because their returns were inferior but because institutional allocators had no pipeline into them.² The solution was a fund of funds — an intermediary vehicle that would aggregate institutional capital, deploy it to minority-led funds, provide LPs with access, and give minority managers the capital they needed.

Credentials as Collateral

The first Fairview fund required white institutional partners in the GP structure because institutional investors in 1994 would not commit capital to a minority-only management team.³ That structural reality — documented in contemporary accounts of the firm — is both the constraint and the context. Morse's Princeton PhD and Price's NAIC presidency provided the academic and professional credentials that made the conversations possible. The credentials were the collateral.

The 2004 Connecticut Investment Advisory Council mandate — selected from 40 competing firms — was the institutional validation that accelerated growth from $3 billion toward $3.5 billion in minority-focused AUM.² By 2023, the State Universities Retirement System of Illinois (SURS) committed an additional $100 million to Fairview's diverse and emerging managers program.⁴

Institutional Roles

Morse has served as a member of the board of trustees of Princeton University.¹ From July 2020 to June 2025, he served as chair of the board of trustees of Howard University — the institution where he received his undergraduate economics degree.¹ He serves on the advisory board of Oakmark Funds, the value investing firm.⁵

Hartford Business Journal named Price and Morse jointly as #17 on their 2023 Power 50 list — the most influential business leaders in Connecticut.⁶ They are in the magazine; they are rarely on national platforms. The institutional investment world is where they operate, and it does not generate the kind of visibility that most business recognition depends on.

Morse and Price describe their work as building infrastructure — the plumbing through which capital flows toward communities structurally excluded from it. Plumbers are not famous. Their work is invisible when it functions correctly. The test of good infrastructure is whether it moves what it is supposed to move. By that measure, Fairview's infrastructure works.

Institutional Inertia

The Emerging Domestic Markets investment thesis — that minority-owned funds were a systematically undervalued asset class — required institutional allocators to change behavior they had not been incentivized to change. Pension funds and endowments allocated to asset managers through pattern recognition: prior returns, institutional affiliations, network introductions. Minority-owned funds had fewer of each because they had been less funded historically, which reduced their return track records, which reduced their institutional affiliations, which reduced their network introductions. The constraint was recursive: the case for investing in minority managers was undermined by the structural effects of not having invested in them.

Morse's Princeton PhD provided credentials that opened institutional doors that would otherwise have been closed. But credentialing an individual does not credential the asset class. Each institutional investor Fairview approached had to be convinced separately that the EDM thesis was sound — that the underperformance of minority-owned funds relative to mainstream funds was a function of undercapitalization rather than manager quality. Making that argument repeatedly, to organizations with deeply entrenched allocation habits, was the ongoing constraint.

As of 2026

Morse continues as Managing Partner and CEO of Fairview Capital Partners. The firm's aggregate capital managed since inception is approximately $10 billion. The EDM investment thesis that Morse co-developed with Price has been validated by the firm's sustained performance over three decades — not by a single outcome but by the accumulation of fund cycles that outperformed the alternative of not allocating to minority managers.

The theoretical framework Morse brought — the economics argument rather than the equity argument — has become more widely adopted in institutional investing discourse, though implementation remains uneven. Fairview remains one of the few institutional fund-of-funds with this explicit mandate at significant scale.