Hotels

To the Editors of The Crimson:

No one should be surprised that Harvard Real Estate had the old Gulf station on Mass. Ave. torn down during Christmas break, when opponents of the University's plans for a hotel there were not around to protest. Harvard pulled the same stunt in 1955, when it demolished Shady Hill, the much-loved old Norton mansion, during summer vacation. What astonishes me is the crassness with which the University thinks it can bulldoze informed and heartfelt reservations about its plans--reservations based on crucial issues of the urban environment, student and faculty working conditions, and the purpose of the University--out of the way.

By every other criterion than that of greed, Harvard Real Estate's hotel plans are painfully foolish. At a time when the Harvard-Radcliffe population desperately needs space and security, HRE is turning University land over to transient strangers. Everyone knows that the Faculty of Arts and Sciences does not have enough space for it teachers to write or teach adequately. There is almost no place where faculty below the associate level can sit in quiet and privacy and think--a process necessary for the writing with which we earn tenure, another fact the University has forgotten. Most of us have less than ideal work environments at home, thanks to the distant, small and decrepit housing forced on us by the yuppification of Harvard Square, to which the University's hotel will of course contribute. Everyone is also aware that freshmen and Writing Center students do not want a structure for transients directly behind their main building. This is an especially unattractive idea after the Science Center rape.

Now, Harvard Real Estate may not care how many freshmen are mugged or how many upperclassmen are run over en route from the River Houses. But I would think someone there would notice that, with all the concessions HRE promises to meet such worries, the hotel will hardly be an attractive, money-earning one. Harvard promises a "moderately priced" hotel to avoid further yuppification, a small one to dodge traffic and transiency problems, one with no public services in order to keep crowds away, and one with a Graham Gund-supplied designer label to keep architecture buffs quiet. First, who is a cheap hotel without a restaurant or view going to attract? Second, why should community residents, who complain that Harvard offers nothing to Cambridge at large, welcome a building that deliberately adds nothing ot the life of the Square, shutting out everyone but paying guests? Finally does anyone expect Graham Gund to design anything less silly and overpriced than his gatehouse at Johnston Gate? (And anyone who thinks of Gund as a preservationist and friend of the community should recall that he is also a very wealthy developer and read up on his current attempts to muscle a commercial development onto Arrow Street over city objections.)

The issue is not the wrongness of Harvard Real Estate's plans for the site, because that is self-evident. The Undergraduate Council and the Harvard faculty, meeting as a body, have demonstrated the stupidity of the plans and of HRE's decision-making processes. The real issue is the incompatibility of Harvard Real Estate's aims in this case with those of the University as a humanistic enterprise. The University's scholars need spaces in which to think; Harvard Real Estate builds rooms for vacationing tourists. The frail symbiotic links between Cambridge and Harvard need to be nurtured through economic and environmental sensitivity; HRE adds another hated commercial development to a polluted and snobbified Harvard Square. Faculty and students--the heart of the University's existence--have begged their institution not to make their lives and careers harder. Jacqueline O'Neill had informed them that where real estate is concerned, Harvard University is a revenue-earning corporation, period. I am ashamed that the University in which I teach presents itself in public as one of the most crass and callous developers in Massachusetts.

Students and faculty must demand that Harvard Real Estate be called to account for its offenses against education, community and environment HRE's management and public relations are doing far more damage to the University than its bungling plans will ever earn back in revenue. If Derek Bok is sincere in his declarations about Harvard's humanistic mission, he will stop HRE from selling off the resources of learning to make a few more lousy bucks. Lecturer, History and Lit.