Mark Rosenzweig Speaks Out
Just days after the Crimson reported that he left Harvard's Center for International Development in part out of dissatisfaction with President Summers, Mark Rosenzweig has written
a letter to the Crimson saying that it ain't so.
Apparently the Crimson printed a part of an e-mail that Rosenzweig had not intended the paper to see (it's very hard to tell exactly what happened), because in his letter Rosenzweig says this:
"This is part of the statement I sent to The Crimson reporter when he was writing the article: 'I believe in CID, and I did not go to Yale because of unhappiness with Harvard, but because of the more assured and superior resources and somewhat more agreeable intellectual directions at Yale, where I was once a faculty member.'"
The first story said this:
"Rosenzweig—who left to join a better-funded program on economic growth at Yale—wrote in an e-mail that Summers 'has not indicated while I was around any interest in CID’s vision or accomplishments.' Though Summers has declared research on international development a top priority of his administration, Rosenzweig said the president never spoke with him before or after naming him director of the center in August 2004.
“''Some think that President Summers wants to (perhaps sub-consciously) organize the study of development around himself, and that is why little or no resources are provided to CID,' Rosenzweig wrote."
So it looks as if the Crimson printed material from an e-mail that Rosenzweig did not intend for public consumption (the paper should probably have been clearer about that).
Rosenzweig's statement in that e-mail feels (to me, anyway) like a man speaking what he considers the truth—it's pretty blunt language—while his letter to the Crimson seems carefully worded and political. One can only wonder what telephone conversations or e-mail exchanges Professor Rosenzweig must have had after the original Crimson article appeared. If anyone knows what the real backstory is, I'd be curious to hear.....
