Now two years later, the CID Steering Committee offers a similar warning.

“The main point is that CID really ought to be a research center that serves the needs of Harvard faculty and Harvard students,” Rodrik says. “We should not be in the business of providing technical assistance or policy advice and consulting.”

CID will be willing to provide support for practical research in the developing world, but only in cases where there are clear academic or instructional benefits to be gained, Rodrik says.

Such a change will mean turning back the clock.

“Over time CID took on more of the attributes of HIID than I or [the committee] thought desirable,” Rodrik says. “We’re concentrated on going back to CID’s root in that sense.”

Rodrik and others on the committee describe how Sachs put a strong intellectual stamp on the center. The jet-setting Sachs brought Harvard’s development center prestige and media attention—he appeared with U2 singer Bono to advocate debt relief and advised the U.N. secretary general on poverty reduction.

But it also distracted CID from what was supposed to be its core mission, Rodrik says.

“Jeff was very keen on having an impact on policy and being very close to policymakers and affecting what they did,” Rodrik says. “This had the effect of involving CID in technical assistance capacities.”

“There was a lot of activism under Sachs,” agrees Professor of Tropical Medicine Andrew Spielmann, a member of Rodrik’s committee.

And because Sachs was “such a forceful person,” Rodrik says, other faculty members and researchers were driven away from CID.

The outlook of Sachs’ CID is reflected in the grants the center sought. Much of CID’s funding was sponsored research—grants paying for advisory activities. And on nearly all of those, Sachs was the principle investigator.

The new CID will be scaled down significantly, with a budget a fraction the size of the old CID and supported by grants aimed at encouraging teaching and research.

While it won’t seek to be a primary source of funds for faculty doing development research, it will try to catalyze and provide support for such work. It will be the type of center that provides the know-how for Harvard professors looking to do survey research in the developing world, Rodrik explains.

It will encourage students to study the Third World’s problems. And practical advising will now be a much smaller part of the picture.

Sachs, meanwhile, disputes that there was any drift during from the center’s original mission under his tenure. The difference is a philosophical one, he explains.