But Summers isn’t just worried about the plan’s vision, associates say.

Special Assistant to the Provost Richard B. Pagett, who served as a transitional executive director of CID this summer, says a number of basic preconditions underlay the steering committee’s charge.

“Summers wanted a financial management plan in place that would mean the center wouldn’t be on the permanent dole, along with a real executive director to keep the center from overspending,” Pagett says.

On its face, the plan and Summers’ expectation once again seem a throwback. When CID was founded, it was given seed money by the provost’s office for its first four years. According to both Pagett and Sachs, there was an expectation that fundraising would increase the center’s endowment and give CID a more solid foundation.

The question of whether CID followed this plan is one answered with bitter acrimony.

According to Pagett it did not. According to Sachs it did.

Pagett says that as CID entered last fiscal year, the final for which provost funds had been allotted, Sachs informed the president and provost’s office that CID was almost certainly going to run a deficit, and it needed an infusion of $500,000.

No new funding from the provost was on its way and according to Pagett two large gifts supporting CID had been spent.

“There was virtually no new gift income coming in,” he says.

It was against this backdrop, Pagett says, that Sachs asked Summers for new funds for the following five years.

And according to Pagett, the request

“did not include a plan that the center would be self-sufficient at the end of the five years”—thus extending CID’s stay on “the dole.”

Summers and Sachs were still negotiating, both have said, when Sachs decided to leave for Columbia.

Summers has declined to comment further on these negotiations.

Sachs says he did everything that was expected of him, and that the center’s long term finances were healthy at the time of his departure.