London

When the University of Cambridge, UK, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced plans for a collaborative institute (see Nature 402, 111; 199910.1038/45882), the move was hailed as a major step forward for both universities. But three years on, the Cambridge-MIT Institute (CMI) is seeking new leadership, amid scant evidence of its results and recurring questions about why it was set up in the first place.

Both executive directors of the institute, which has been promised up to £68 million (US$108 million) in British government funds, are to step down in January. A spokesperson for the CMI says that Alan Windle, the Cambridge executive director, and John Vander Sande, MIT executive director, are leaving to concentrate on their research, and that both feel they have finished their jobs of setting up the partnership.

The institute was billed as an attempt to bolster Cambridge's exploitation of its research by creating spin-off firms and building partnerships with companies. It was also intended to organize student exchanges and training programmes for academics, and to fund collaborative research projects.

But the project has been dogged by controversy. Critics have even dubbed it the 'Cambridge Dome' — a reference to London's Millennium Dome, which was built at great public cost to little apparent purpose.

“This was a vast sum of money given without proper supervision, and there was really no clear idea what to spend it on,” claims Gillian Evans, a history researcher at Cambridge who was a member of the university's governing council and a critic of the arrangement.

The British government has refused to confirm what the institute's $14-million annual funding allocation is being spent on, saying that it is not free to do so until the CMI, which operates as a limited company, publishes its accounts.

But in a report published on 6 November, the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee describes the decision to fund the institute as “somewhat curious”. Ian Gibson, chair of the committee, says that he plans to question science minister David Sainsbury about it later this month. “It seems a strange way for money to come out of the blue on a whim of somebody,” Gibson says. Other universities were angered by the decision to allocate the money to Cambridge without giving them the opportunity to compete for the partnership.

But defenders of the CMI say that with MIT wanting to collaborate with Cambridge, an open competition would have been a waste of time. Although the institute got off to a slow start, Vander Sande says that several research projects, joint courses and student exchanges are now taking place.