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.