Partly in response to the generally dismal hedge fund returns of 2008, partly in response to the alleged Madoff Ponzi scheme, hedge fund investors are scrambling for safety.  For some, safety means redeeming and parking the proceeds (when they’re in cash rather than kind) in a safe place – cash or Treasuries in custody accounts, and other sleep-at-night type investments.  Others would like to stay the course in hedge funds, but with new and – from hedge fund managers’ perspective – occasionally onerous conditions.  In this latter category, an increasingly frequent demand from institutional investors is that as a condition of new or remaining investments, hedge fund managers appoint independent administrators, even where the manager was heretofore providing many or all administrative service in-house.  We detail the functions of an administrator, and explore the implications for both hedge fund managers and administrators of the growing chorus of requests from institutional investors to outsource administrative functions.