New VP Stone Pledges To Work With City

Harvard’s last chief community relations officer left his post after only two years. The man below him in the office who represented University interests to Cambridge lasted only 18 months.

Both former Harvard officials Paul S. Grogan and Travis McCready were wooed from the University by the same Boston charity. But both also left saying they had encountered frustrations in working with the Cambridge community they hadn’t expected.

Now, as the newly installed vice president of government, community and public relations, Alan Stone, moves into his position, he plans to meet soon with city officials in the hopes of making a good first impression on those whose past criticism of Harvard has been both strident and sustained.

Stone comes to Harvard from Columbia University, where he held a similar job for the past six years. One week into office, he says he hopes to stay put for a while.

“I have no anticipation of being someone who leaves quickly,” Stone says.

But he enters an office that presented significant stresses to past occupants.

Some administrators have lasted in Harvard’s office of government, community and public relations for decades, but its two most recent hires before Stone were also the most recent to leave.

Stone’s post opened last April when Grogan left his vice presidential post at Harvard to assume the Boston Foundation’s presidency.

Grogan had said when he arrived he would remain in office for at least five years. But he said when he left that the Boston Foundation was giving him the “opportunity of a lifetime.” He cut his Harvard tenure short at two years.

Then last month, from his position at the Boston Foundation, Grogan tapped McCready, Harvard’s director of community relations for Cambridge, to be his chief of staff. A year and a half earlier, McCready had entered optimistic about the work he planned to do for Harvard in Cambridge.

He would be leading University discussions with Cambridge residents about ongoing development projects in the Mid-Cambridge and Riverside neighborhoods—a prospect he looked forward to.

“There seems to be intelligent dialogue conducted for the most part in a respectful manner,” he told the Harvard Gazette at the time.

But by last spring, negotiations with Riverside had bogged down over Harvard’s plans to build a modern art museum in the neighborhood. Residents decried any Harvard intrusion into their neighborhood.

The hostility and public attacks took their toll on McCready.

“It’s frustrating sometimes that there are people who want to be activists and are not always tempered by reason,” McCready told The Crimson last spring.

Looking back, McCready says he believes most Cantabrigians are ready to talk fairly with the University. But to his dismay, he says, a vocal anti-Harvard minority dominates town-gown discussions.

“I was not prepared to deal with those people who feel that if Harvard’s in any way associated with it, it’s bad,” McCready says.

He left the job at Harvard with the Riverside issue unresolved.

Grogan, McCready’s boss at Harvard, also took considerable heat from Cambridge community members for the Riverside issue as well as other Harvard projects in the city.

And he says he left feeling a similar surprise and disappointment that some people were so dead set against all that pertained to Harvard.

Grogan says public knowledge of the size of Harvard’s endowment handicapped his ability to promote the University’s interests.

Harvard is “just a bank account” to many people, Grogan says. “From a public relations perspective, the size of the endowment is a problem.”

Grogan also came down strongly at the time of his departure against the Cambridge City Council, which he said made no pretense of representing the greater Cambridge community.

“If you confined your research to [the City Council], you would conclude that Harvard was a kind of plague that descended on the city that caused all sorts of awful things to go on,” Grogan told The Crimson last spring.

On Tuesday, voters reelected seven out of the nine councillors who Grogan worked with last year.

Stone plans to meet with many of the same councillors in the near future. He says he is prepared for discussions on past Harvard missteps.

“Part of community relations is acknowledging strong feelings and mindsets,” he says.

Given Stone’s experience at Columbia, McCready forecasts that Stone will be able to weather community relations in Cambridge.

“He has really thick skin and I think that’s important,” McCready says. “There are some really tough issues out there, and with those issues it will probably get worse before it gets better.”

—David H. Gellis contributed to the reporting of this story.

—Staff writer Andrew S. Holbrook can be reached at holbr@fas.harvard.edu.