Development Center’s Future in Jeopardy

Harvard may shut down its Center for International Development (CID) after economist Kenneth S. Rogoff leaves his position as director of the center July 1.

Two senior members of the Kennedy School faculty, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told The Crimson Friday that University President Lawrence H. Summers is considering the possibility of eliminating the center entirely.

One of the professors noted that the the CID has been hindered by a severe budget crunch. “You can’t run a center without money,” the source said.

In an interview yesterday evening, Summers said he would neither confirm nor deny that the center will remain in existence next academic year.

Summers said that he and David T. Ellwood ’75, the incoming dean of the Kennedy School, will reach a final decision regarding the center’s future in the next few weeks.

But regardless of the decision, Summers said, the resources that the center currently offers to undergraduates will still be available in some form.

Rogoff will resign from his CID post at the end of the current academic year “so that he can devote himself to teaching and research,” University spokesperson Joe Wrinn said Friday.

Rogoff, who was the chief economist at the International Monetary Fund from 2001 to 2003, will continue to serve as Cabot professor of public policy.

The CID, headquartered on the Kennedy School campus, was established in 1998, supplanting the scandal-ridden Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID) as a clearinghouse for researchers across the University who are studying emerging economies.

Six years later, the center’s future is uncertain.

“The whole leadership as I understand it is in flux at the moment,” said Frederick Schauer, the Stanton professor of the First Amendment.

Schauer served on the Faculty Oversight Committee that steered the CID after Columbia University lured the center’s founding director, economist Jeffrey D. Sachs ’76, away from Harvard in 2001.

But professors who served on the oversight committee say the group has not been resuscitated to manage the CID after Rogoff’s departure.

“As far as I know, the committee was disbanded,” said former member Merilee S. Grindle, the Mason professor of international development.

“If it does exist, it hasn’t met,” said Mark R. Rosenzweig, who is the Kamal professor of public policy and served on the oversight committee alongside Grindle and Schauer.

The CID is one of an array of University programs that “have development as an important priority,” Wrinn wrote in an e-mail, citing the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, the Global Health Initiative, the Center for Population and Development Studies and the Center for the Environment.

Administrators are “trying to figure out how best to take advantage of these diverse resources and how the CID’s programs ought to fit into this landscape,” Wrinn wrote. “The University is committed to a vibrant research program in international development.” But in an interview with The Crimson in October, Rogofff said that the CID “is the only development center at Harvard. Harvard needs a development center.”

The center’s precursor, HIID, was dissolved in 2000 amidst allegations that two Harvard employees affiliated with the institute had conspired to defraud a Maine-based mutual fund of millions of dollars.

The University, along with Professor of Economics Andrei Shleifer ’82 and Jonathan Hay, former general director of HIID in Moscow, still faces a $102 million federal lawsuit in connection with the allegations. University officials have filed a brief disputing the charges.

The case involved an HIID program that counseled the Russian Federation—one of the institute’s many initiatives offering advice to foreign governments and international agencies.

HIID “was a behemoth and had a very strong consulting focus,” Rogoff said in an interview Thursday.

He said the CID’s “central charge is to do teaching and research, and to advance knowledge.” Even under Sachs, the center had begun to shift its focus from advising to academics, Rogoff said.

“I really like teaching, and that’s why I’m here,” said Rogoff, who this semester teaches undergraduates as well as doctoral candidates at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS).

“It’s challenging to balance teaching and research full-time at FAS with being the director at the center...on top of which my family lives in D.C. at the moment,” Rogoff said.

Sachs taught a broad range of classes during his time at Harvard, including courses at FAS, the Kennedy School and the Law School. But he also toured the world with U2 singer Bono to promote debt relief efforts and advised U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan on poverty reduction.

“In many subjects (public health, macro stabilization, etc.), advisory work is a critical component of first-rate research,” Sachs wrote in an e-mail to The Crimson yesterday. “It is akin to the fact that advances in human medical science often require a clinical setting as well, not simply an office or laboratory.”

Despite the uncertainty surrounding CID’s future, Rogoff said that “the field of development is in extremely good shape at Harvard.”

In 1999, the center played a pivotal rule in launching the Kennedy School’s two-year graduate program granting a master’s degree in public administration/international development (MPAID).

“I found that CID and MPAID were mutually supportive programs,” Sachs wrote. “The idea of CID is to provide a home where cross-disciplinary activities directed at development (e.g. the integration of economics, public health, the natural environment, and politics) can be fruitfully achieved.”

“I’m not in the loop on CID at all, so I don’t know what’s happening or what’s planned,” wrote Sachs, who now directs Columbia’s Earth Institute. “I would hope, though, that Harvard keeps a vibrant development center at the Kennedy School of Government.”

—Staff writer Lauren A. E. Schuker contributed to the reporting of this article.

—Staff writer Daniel J. Hemel can be reached at hemel@fas.harvard.edu.