Your post assumes readers have a significant amount of knowledge about Cornell. Most of us have no idea what the "Peoplesoft/Duffield Hall disaster" was, what CIT stands for, or who Lehman is.
CIT == Cornell Information Technology, the central IT organization.
The Peoplesoft/Duffield Hall disaster was two connected scandals.
David Duffield (the Peoplesoft founder) donated money to build Duffield hall, which houses a national nanotechnology center. That nanotechnology also received startup funds from the NSF, which required that Cornell raise matching funds from some source that wasn't the NSF. When they demanded documentation, Cornell said that was impossible (paperwork is SNAFU), the NSF said "This is an eligibility requirement, not a reporting requirement". Cornell was informed it wouldn't be getting any more funding from the NSF if it didn't correct the situation.
Around the same time Cornell attempted a Peoplesoft implementation that went at least $50 million over budget while implementing only 20% of the original scope.
The first project manager they hired said there was no way they could do the project with the budget they wanted, they fired him and hired a Yes Man. The rest is history.
Jeff Lehman was president of Cornell for about a year. He announced his resignation at Alumni week, shocking people. The cause of his resignation was kept secret, but I can't help but believe that he took office when the above mentioned scandals hit. (These certainly were not his fault because the situations started before his watch)
What I do know is that there was a severe money pinch, which caused a series of cascading failures, and also that everything at Cornell that was unique and special had to fight for it's right to exist, while they kept chasing the same fads as all the other Ivys.
Was this why Lehman quit? I don't know. But I do know if he stayed he would have been cleaning up an awful mess instead of leading new initiatives.
Cornell has an endowment in excess of $7 billion dollars, why wouldn't some of that have been used to ensure the "unique & special" didn't die? Politics?
