“According to my knowledge, that hasn’t happened,” he said.

Hyman could not be reached over the weekend because he was in South Africa and Botswana meeting with government officials and Harvard researchers working on the PEPFAR project.

“I don’t think anyone would disagree that the University has a responsibility to oversee the grant,” Willett said. “I think there was in this particular instance a displacement of the principal investigator’s role. And there’s no contradiction in the [principal investigator] having primary responsibility along with major central university oversight.”

Another SPH faculty member, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that he found the central administration’s oversight of the program to be “prejudicial and unfair” to Kanki.

Kanki declined comment for this story.

Hyman said last week that central administration’s concern for the program stemmed in part from the way in which the grant was procured.

“The School [of Public Health] in its haste hadn’t told anyone that they were trying to get a grant that would commit Harvard to treating 8,000 people, and the government deadlines did not give us time to coordinate,” he said.

The White House announced the PEPFAR grant program in December 2003 and gave researchers four weeks to submit proposals.

Hyman also said that the Joint Committee on Inspections, a monitoring board made up of members of the Corporation and the Board of Overseers and led by Corporation Senior Fellow James R. Houghton ’58, had some reservations about the grant from the outset.

“When the Joint Committee gave permission to allow the project to go forward last spring—and they reiterated this last Sunday—they only gave permission to go forward if financial and administrative control and the authority to commit Harvard University to additional responsibilities were in the hands of someone with deep administrative experience in global development projects,” Hyman said.

“But ultimately it is a very serious and difficult business that the school has committed us to,” he added. “We’re not normally in the business of providing services, let alone internationally. Quality matters. There are human lives at stake. There are big issues of liability.”

Bloom declined to comment on the letter.

In an interview with The Crimson in February, Bloom said that Harvard should not just be in the business of “pushing pills.” But he added that the “best school of public health in the world has an obligation to address the biggest problem of public health in the world.”

“Our commitment is to train people to be able to create and sustain their own AIDS programs,” Bloom said. He reaffirmed those comments through a spokeswoman last week.

A TENSE RELATIONSHIP