Administration Ponders Three Scenarios

This time last year planning for University land in Allston was advancing at a snail’s pace. Neil L. Rudenstine was the lame-duck president and president-elect Lawrence H. Summers was still a passive listener making his first rounds of introduction.

A committee had recommended that Allston be developed as an academic campus—not simply a dumping ground for overcrowded Cambridge, as originally imagined—but the decision to go forward with planning for this campus waited for the new president.

There was talk of uniting the University’s professional schools on the other side of the river, but the Law School—considered essential to any professional campus—had voted against considering a move.

Save for a spat over a tax on the University’s various schools to raise money for work on infrastructure, physical planning for Allston stayed off of the agenda.

But now the University has stepped up the pace.

Summers pledged to build a campus for the future in Allston during his inauguration speech last October and has been working all year to start the process.

At Summers’ urging the Law School is now considering building plans for both Allston and Cambridge.

On the University-wide level, three scenarios for development have emerged that will dominate the first stage of planning.

And Summers has outlined a process, replete with faculty committees and outside consultants, to start work on plans for expansion to Allston.

The Central Committee

Seventeen faculty and administrators representing Harvard’s schools, museums and central administration head up the University’s planning for Allston.

Ultimately, Summers and the Harvard Corporation will make the crucial decisions on Allston—setting timetables, authorizing building and deciding who will move. But in the meantime, this body—the University Committee on Physical Planning—will produce the visionary thinking and concrete progress that Summers has promised.

Responsible for all physical planning that cuts across the University’s independent schools, this committee made the recommendation two years ago that Allston should be used for an academic campus.

But with Summers’ arrival the committee has taken on greater importance. Summers has stated that all physical planning across the University will have to take into account the future of Allston.

Before the Law School decides to expand further in Cambridge, for example, the University needs to know whether the school will eventually be moving across the river.

The task of planning for this future in Allston has catapulted to the top of the committee’s agenda.

Senior Adviser to the President Dennis F. Thompson, who chaired the committee two years ago, returned from a sabbatical to head up a reconstituted body with a far more specific charge.

The committee has been expanded to include more faculty and a greater focus on community relations.

Thompson says the committee will be investigating “more closely and skeptically” the benefits that might result from freeing up space in Cambridge. In the past, Thompson says, the committee’s work on Allston had concentrated only on what would happen across the river.

And for the first time the committee will begin looking at specific plans for using land—both in Cambridge and in Allston.

The initial steps toward these more concrete plans were taken at the committee’s first meeting in February.

According to Thompson, the committee decided to focus on three scenarios as a starting point for Allston planning.

One, referred to as the “culture and community” model, focuses on Allston as a space for new graduate student dorms and museums moved out of Cambridge.

While the committee will be treating the model as a separate scenario, housing and cultural contributions to Allston will be part of any final plan, Thompson says.

A second scenario, the professional school model, calls for the consolidation of a number of the University’s graduate schools in a new campus across the river. This is the plan that the Law School had refused to consider but is being forced by Summers to rethink.

Added to the mix is a third model—a plan for science in Allston that has emerged since Summers’ arrival.

While the details on this plan are sketchy, the scenario envisions a new interdisciplinary science campus in Allston and dovetails with Summers’ goal of strengthening Harvard’s place at the front of a revolution in biological science. Summers speaks in terms of a new Silicon Valley for biomedical research and says Allston could play a part in his vision.

While the committee decided to focus on the three scenarios, “they also made clear that a mixed model is more likely in the end,” Thompson says.

In a further sign that Allston planning has accelerated, the committee is in the process of hiring at least a pair of consultants to study these possibilities.

“One consultant will gather information and ideas about the needs of the schools,” Thompson says. “The other, more of an architect-planner, will examine space on both sides of the river and flesh out the three scenarios.”

The committee plans on receiving the consultants’ reports—which will represent the most detailed analyses to date of the Allston move—next winter or spring.

Thompson adds that there is the possibility of hiring additional outside advisors as the process gets underway.

Competing for The Chance

Thompson describes the goals of this first round of planning as multifaceted.

Even though a full academic campus is still decades away, the decisions the University makes now will seriously impact future possibilities for Allston.

Thompson says that coming up with a plan for “phased development” is, as a result, crucially important.

The planning for Allston that has occurred in the past focused mostly on the distant future.

“We now need to think about what happens in the meantime—5, 10 and 15 years from now,” Thompson says. “We want to make sure that when we move activities in the short-run, we don’t damage the long-run plans.”

But current planning also aims to generate interest in Allston among schools and departments now skeptical of a move.

Earlier this fall, Summers asked a reluctant Law School to form a committee to study options for Allston. The idea, University and Law School officials have said, was to induce the school to begin thinking about the possibility of a move.

Thompson says that there will be at least two more faculty groups formed as spin-offs from his committee—one on the “culture and community” model, another to discuss the science scenario. A third advisory group, on the professional school campus, could be created after the Law School committee issues its report this spring.

According to Provost Steven E. Hyman, the administration hopes that the process will encourage schools and departments to look constructively at the benefits offered by a move to Allston

“We hope that after the committees have given conceptual reality and some physical plans to the idea, we’d see schools competing to move,” Hyman says.

—Staff writer David H. Gellis can be reached at gellis@fas.harvard.edu.