Harvard's Lost Report

The actural forces of supply and demand primarily for housing but also for commercial space--are such that it is only necessary for Harvard to do nothing for Cambridge to become a predominantly upper middle class community--that is to say, a community very much like Harvard itself. In one sense, such an evolution would resolve many of the conflicts between university and community of which this committee has spoken. Life would be deplete for Harvard. But is would not be better.

FROM ALL THE recommendations presented in the Preliminary Report of the University and City, a report commissioned by University president Nathan M. Pusey, '28 in 1968. It is unfortunate that the University chose to adopt the above passage as its unofficial community policy, leaving out the last ominous line.

The report, an honest attempt by committee chairman James Q. Wilson and ten others to stave off possible University vs. city collision and recommend community policy changes, has been all but buried by dust--and a hefty supply of interim and long range planning reports. The Faculty, "adopted" the report in a hectic April 1969 meeting, passed it on to the Administration, and saw few of its suggestions implemented. Neither did the residents of Cambridge.

Although the Wilson report is not a classic in the urban studies genre--it makes no mention of the University's economic impact on the city--many of its now forgotten suggestions and criticisms are still applicable today.

It is hard today to imagine 2000 students rallying at Harvard Stadium to pass a resolution demanding that the University build low cost housing in Cambridge. Nor is it possible to imagine strolling through areas surrounding Harvard and feeling the heat from tenants as rich grad students outbid them for their homes. But before the days of rent control (an ineffective mechanism that effectively eliminated Harvard as a scapegoat for fluctuating rents) when some students cared more about non-existent community housing than cramped University quarters, or bad food, there was enough student pressure on the University to force it to explain why it was tearing down someone's low cost dwelling.

It was this non-communication, this ability to exploit the community with a poker face, that the Wilson report attacked. Sensing the anxiety that boiled in residents as they were led from the old Office of Civic and Government Relations to the Planning Office to the Real Estate Office, whenever they wanted simple answers concerning the wrecking machines about to rip into their houses, the Wilson report recommended that a vice president for external affairs be appointed to establish community policy and answer directly to neighborhood queries. Wilson points out today that this suggestion was later incorporated by Bok.

But Bok's vice-president hardly performs the tasks described in the Wilson report. Instead of a public relations figure spouting the Harvard line to stepped-on community groups, the External Affairs vice president was to have actual authority over the planning and real estate offices. The officer in charge would then offset the real estate office (which is by nature interested primarily in meeting low-cost University land need) by "representing to the University the demands and interests of community groups and individuals and pressing the University to take account of those interests even if so doing would raise land costs, increase the price of relocation, or produce financially less attractive rentals." Now the vice president appears to "represent the demands and interests" of the University to the community.

In direct response to the pressing housing crisis, a crisis that has gotten worse since the report came out, the committee recommended that the University spur the Cambridge Corporation into producing enough low and moderate income housing to replace the hundreds of units that Harvard has taken off the market. And yet only 94 units of elderly housing on Mt. Auburn St, and the 116 units on Cambridge and Prospect Sts, were ever built, and the Cambridge Corp. lies fallow--killed during the worst housing shortage in the history of Cambridge, claiming that its duty was done.

BUT THE MOST important suggestion that the University has chosen to forget is that Harvard, just because of its existence in the city, can no longer take a neutral course:

If it should be passive and let events take their course, it will implicitly choose a certain kind of environment--one, perhaps, in which all Cambridge slowly becomes like Harvard and MIT until we find that we are no longer an urban university but one which has allowed there to grow up around itself a kind of inner-city suburb with a single life style.

And yet somehow the University has managed to stay on that neutral course, steering clear of community groups, feigning neighborhood participation, and failing to be responsive to the reasonable requests of local residents.

And it will be able to keep on this path as long as students don't remind it of the promises of the 60's; and as long as community groups stay so tied up in battling projects like the Kennedy Library that they ignore the behavior of Harvard itself. And when the crash finally comes, the University will authorize a committee to write a report on the problems of the University and the city. And it will probably arrive at the same solutions that the Wilson report came up with seven long years ago.