Councillors Clash Over Harvard, MIT

In a heated discussion last night, the Cambridge City Council clashed fiercely over how it should deal with what one councillor called the city’s “two huge gorillas”—Harvard and MIT.

As the argument intensified, Mayor Michael A. Sullivan said the tenor of the meeting was the result of “frustration and venting and anger and mistrust” at the city’s two major institutions of higher education.

Last night’s meeting had been scheduled simply to set the agenda for a meeting of the council’s newly formed university relations subcommittee next week. But councillors quickly clashed over the entire process of dealing with the universities.

“I feel like it’s a big waste of my time,” Councillor Marjorie C. Decker said of the upcoming meeting.

In the past, the subcommittee has met in City Hall and pointedly asked university representatives not to attend. The meeting next week is the first slated to include Harvard and MIT officials and will be held on neutral ground, in the Kendall Square offices of the Biogen company.

Several councillors said they worried the meeting would occur before the council had formulated a specific list of grievances and issues on which to engage the universities.

“I don’t want Harvard and MIT to just be rolling along while we’re sitting around having a nice conversation,” said Councillor E. Denise Simmons, who speculated Harvard and MIT representatives would agree to long-term plans with councillors while their institutions carried out secret development plans.

Several councillors also objected that Councillor David P. Maher had not specifically requested the attendance of Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers and MIT President Charles M. Vest.

“When you have a meeting with Harvard that doesn’t include its president, you aren’t meeting with Harvard,” said Councillor Kenneth E. Reeves ’72.

But Maher, who chairs the subcommittee, defended his decision to invite only public relations officials—Harvard Vice President for Government, Community and Public Affairs Alan J. Stone and MIT Executive Vice President John R. Curry—at the first meeting with the universities.

He said the meeting would be the first step in getting “the two huge gorillas” to work with the city’s elected officials and community members.

“If we can come to a verbal agreement with Alan Stone on the 28th, he will go to Larry Summers and say that this is a policy he can go through with,” Maher said. “[Summers] told me he will buy into this.”

But other councillors said they did not yet know what to expect from Harvard’s president less than a year after he took office.

“[Summers] is the new elephant in the room,” Reeves said. “No one knows the personality of Harvard’s new president.”

Policing Harvard’s Policy

Also last night the council decided to address the recent change to the Administrative Board’s policies that tightens the standards for starting a sexual assault investigation.

The council unanimously voted to look into the Harvard policy and ensure that students are given the same “fair and appropriate treatment...that the City Council expects [for] all Cambridge residents.”

Sullivan, who sponsored the measure, said the council should guarantee the rights of victims and assure that “appropriate procedures” are being taken to handle sexual assault complaints.

Councillor Henrietta Davis expressed concern that “the University policy might be less than supportive to the victims.”

“We want to make sure they aren’t creating a second class of citizens in students,” Davis said.

The council instructed City Manager Robert W. Healy to confer with the Cambridge police commissioner and the Middlesex County district attorney’s office to determine existing standards for sexual assault allegations and rights of sexual assault victims.

The council’s order also called for Healy to meet with the Harvard University Police Department and Harvard administrators and then report back to the council.

—Staff writer Stephanie M. Skier can be reached at skier@fas.harvard.edu.