An Adversary Relationship

And you thought the Red Sox and the Yankees had a rivalry.

The City of Cambridge took the offensive last month in its continuing struggle with Harvard, mailing angry letters to the Board of Overseers and threatening to trim the University's political power.

City Councilor Mary Ellen Preusser wrote the letters to the board, citing what she called a "climate which makes good relations impossible."

The Board of Overseers did consider the question at its Monday meeting, but members have declined to comment on what steps were taken.

However, the chairman of the Overseers, Andrew Heiskell, wrote the council a letter saying a committee would deal with the matter, and said that he and other board members "regretted" any bad relations.

The litany of city complaints against the University include the eviction of tenants in buildings on Mellon, Ware and Sumner Streets and a low-interest loan program for faculty members that city officials fear will dry up the already near-barren Cambridge housing market.

The basic city-University problems are more deeply rooted, however, caused--according to the city--by what Councilor David Wylie terms "Harvard's inability" to establish "a conservative dialogue" with the city.

"They don't like to make commitments, they like to leave their options open," Wylie said. "They like to feel that, if in the year 2000 they want to do something, they damn well will," he added.

"That kind of planning should have gone out 50 years ago," Wylie said.

Harvard does wield a lot of political clout in the city, as much or more than any other institution in Cambridge. The council is threatening to cut back on some of that power, though, in the wake of what Preusser termed "an institutional powerplay" by Harvard.

The University angered some councilors by exercising its prerogative as a 20-per-cent land owner in the Harvard Square area to effectively kill zoning regulations that would have restricted development in the Square.

At Monday's council meeting, though, Preusser claimed the provision allowing Harvard to intervene is unconstitutional because it decreases the voting power of other Cambridge residents.

Preusser's motion to reverse the vote on the zoning proposal was "charter righted" or tabled for the moment, but the legality of the motion itself was upheld on a 5-4 vote, an indication of how the final tally may split.

The University did take the first steps toward assuaging some of the hard feelings last week, when Graduate School of Design officials announced that they would consider giving tenants on Sumner St., scheduled to be evicted on June 1, more time to move.

One tenant in the building, John MacLean, summed up the situation, "Harvard can be a very resonable place--if you get to the right people," he said.