Harvard officials are questioning a claim from the CEO of Oracle Corp., Lawrence Ellison, that he backed out of a $115 million donation because of the ouster of the university’s president, Lawrence Summers.

“The reason I didn’t finish my gift to Harvard was because of the way Larry Summers suddenly left Harvard,” Mr. Ellison said, according to an article yesterday in a London newspaper, the Daily Telegraph. “I lost confidence that that money would be well spent.”

The now-shuttered Ellison Institute for World Health at Harvard University was to pursue a multidisciplinary approach to assessing the efficacy of international health programs. Several people hired to work at the institute have been laid off, officials said.

“What concerned me was that this was a very controversial project. We’re not hiring health care researchers.We’re hiring economists to write and rank what programs work, what programs don’t work,” Mr. Ellison told the Telegraph.

Mr. Ellison’s claim that he withdrew the gift because of the tumult over Mr. Summers is puzzling because, according to Harvard officials, the billionaire software guru broke off contact with the school in November, at a time when the Harvard president was not thought to be in any jeopardy.

“I’m not sure what to make of Ellison’s remarks as he was not willing to speak with Summers on this topic, despite repeated attempts,” a Harvard professor who was to lead the institute, Christopher Murray, told Bloomberg News yesterday.

In January 2005, Mr. Summers triggered a firestorm by suggesting at an economics conference that genetics played some role in the paucity of women in top-ranking academic math and science posts. Two months later, he was censured by a vote of Harvard’s arts and sciences faculty.

By November, when Mr. Ellison seems to have begun retreating from his gift, all indications were that Mr. Summers would weather the storm.

In February 2006, Mr. Summers resigned under pressure, following a fresh and relatively brief round of controversy triggered by reports he forced out a popular dean, William Kirby.

A journalist who wrote a biography of Mr. Ellison, Mike Wilson, said it is likely the software executive would have viewed Mr. Summers as a man unfairly hounded for speaking his mind.

Mr. Ellison “would probably have seen what happened at Harvard as an example of extreme political correctness,” Mr. Wilson told The New York Sun.” I don’t think he has very much patience with that.”