In an unprecedented move toward centralized control, top University administrators last summer took direct authority over the administration of a high-profile federal government grant that was awarded to the Harvard School of Public Health (SPH).

Now, SPH faculty are expressing concern over the way the grant was handled and the school’s dean expressed regret for his role in the situation at a faculty retreat last month, according to one SPH professor.

In February 2004, the White House awarded a team led by Professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases Phyllis Kanki $107 million to fight AIDS in Africa as part of the President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the government program entrusted with disbursing $15 billion to help eradicate AIDS in Africa. The grant commits Harvard to treating thousands of patients a year with anti-viral drugs and implementing clinical drug delivery mechanisms in three African countries—Botswana, Nigeria, and Tanzania.

Worried about the scope of the project and reportedly angered about being left out of the loop—University President Lawrence H. Summers is said to have learned of the SPH grant in a newspaper—central administrators took a series of drastic steps to take control of the grant.

To Provost Steven E. Hyman and other central administrators, these measures were necessary to ensure that the project—funded by the largest government grant Harvard has ever received—was managed properly. But to many at SPH, these steps were a heavy-handed power grab.

Last year, the central administration attempted to force Kanki to co-manage the grant with Dr. Bruce D. Walker, a Harvard researcher at Mass. General Hospital who had also applied for a PEPFAR grant, according to one SPH professor.

Top administrators then forced Kanki to submit to having an executive director oversee the project and report directly to Summers, Hyman, and SPH Dean Barry R. Bloom.

In a letter sent last August and obtained by The Crimson, Bloom outlined for Kanki the new hierarchy of the PEPFAR project, including the executive director. Kanki and other project administrators were also prohibited from contacting the government and local partners about the without first consulting the executive director.

“Your voices are critical to the program’s success, and must be heard, but there may well be decisions made with which you disagree,” Bloom wrote. “If and when this happens, you must respect those decisions and work to implement them.”

The letter also stated that Kanki should refrain from speaking out about the administrative structure being imposed on the grant.

“Any complaints about the history of this grant should cease,” the letter says.

According to faculty members who attended an SPH faculty retreat last month, Bloom said that he now finds the letter “hurtful and onerous” and that he hoped the letter would be retracted.

Chair of SPH’s Department of Nutrition Walter C. Willett said that Kanki herself “wants to get the letter rescinded.”

“She’s extraordinary committed to getting the work done and really wants to get the letter resolved and get the work done,” Willett said. “It remains an issue.”

Willett said yesterday that Hyman told him two weeks ago that the letter was being rescinded.

“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

The issue of Mass. Hall oversight of the PEPFAR grant has received more attention recently from SPH faculty because of more general tensions between the SPH and the University.

SPH faculty have met twice in the past couple of months to discuss Summers’ management of the University and his comments on women in science. One faculty member, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that other issues, such as the move to Allston and the management of the PEPFAR grant, have surfaced in these discussions, and more recently at the SPH faculty retreat the weekend of Mar. 29.

These meetings led to the SPH faculty council’s invitation to Summers to attend an SPH faculty meeting, which he did last Wednesday in a closed-door session.

Jennifer Leaning, chair of the SPH faculty council, said that Summers made it “very clear” at the meeting that future grants of this nature will also be administered with a “substantial amount of managerial oversight by central administration,” Leaning said.

Leaning added that Summers told faculty at the meeting last week that the grant could have been managed better.

“There was mutual acknowledgement that the ways in which [this] grant was handled was not the way that any party would have liked it to happen,” she said.

“We just want to make sure that people with the right administrative skills are in the right positions,” Hyman said last week. “With respect to the scientific aspects, I am proud and delighted to have Dr. Kanki at the helm.”

Summers could not be reached for comment yesterday, a spokesman said.

—Staff writer May Habib can be reached at habib@fas.harvard.edu