Message to Tunnel: You've Got Mail

The controversial tunnel that Harvard plans to dig underneath Cambridge Street may never see the light of day—but now it has its own e-mail address where fans can send it messages of support.

Administrators with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences recently created the e-mail account—tunnel@fas—to coordinate a support campaign for the embattled tunnel.

Getting official approval from the City of Cambridge for the underground passageway remains the last obstacle in the way of a pet Harvard project, which would build a major new Center for Government and International Studies (CGIS).

Facing a reticent city council—most councillors have said they will not support the project that many Cambridge residents oppose—the Faculty has launched a signature collection effort. And government professors, administrators and others have signed on by the dozens.

Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology Theda Skocpol, who is leading the drive, says she hopes the University’s petition will encourage the city council to avoid “foot-dragging and decision by delay.”

“These buildings need to move ahead,” she says.

The effort is meant to show Cambridge that Harvard affiliates are city residents, too, says Williams Professor of History and Political Science Roderick MacFarquhar, who chairs the government department and signed on to the petition.

“It’s ‘citizens of the government department who live in Cambridge unite,’” he quips. “We’ve got nothing to lose but our tunnel.”

Neither Skocpol nor MacFarquhar say they know how the tunnel@fas e-mail address was set up or how many signatures are currently on the petition.

Officials with Harvard Arts and Science Computing Services, who maintain the Faculty’s e-mail system, decline to explain who had set up the account or when. And an e-mail sent to tunnel@fas inquiring about the status of the petition did not clear up who monitors the account.

“Ms. Hunter is simply a conduit, and not active in the petition effort,” an unsigned reply message said of an assistant who works in University Hall.

The message continued: “The number of signatures is growing, and we are encouraged by the support for the tunnel from the citizens of Cambridge.”

No matter how many people sign on to the petition, Cambridge Mayor Michael A. Sullivan says the effort will make little difference to the city council.

“I probably have 600 names on another petition that says ‘no,’” Sullivan says.

Full Steam Ahead

Even if the tunnel issue remains unresolved this spring, Harvard officials insist the construction of CGIS—on parts of the project unrelated to the tunnel—will begin after immediately after Commencement.

But in the meantime the tunnel remains bogged down in layers of consultants and committees.

Last Friday, a joint Cambridge-Harvard committee met for the first time to negotiate issues surrounding the tunnel construction. The committee had been formed at the request of the city council last month and the appointments were made by City Manager Robert W. Healy.

The committee is comprised of three Harvard representatives, three city officials and three residents of the Mid-Cambridge neighborhood where Harvard seeks to build CGIS.

On Monday, the same day Healy publicly announced the committee’s membership, the neighborhood contingent submitted a letter expressing its dissatisfaction with how the panel was formed and how negotiations had progressed so far.

In their letter to Healy and the city council, Mid-Cambridge residents took issue with the proposed deadline for its work—May 29—arguing that timeline is “unrealistic.”

Neighbors have long said they would like to see CGIS’ south building—surrounded on three sides by apartment buildings—scaled back. They have suggested the neighborhood might accept the tunnel, but only if Harvard builds what the neighbors call a “modified south building.”

“Our contention has been from the beginning that the project is much too large from the area and that it changes the area drastically by putting the Yard into our backyard,” says Betty Collins, one of the neighborhood’s three representatives on the committee.

In their letter, the neighbors argued that the negotiation process that Healy outlined, which focuses almost entirely on the tunnel itself, takes “too narrow a view” of what is under discussion.

And they wrote that, in the first meeting, Harvard representatives “distance[d] themselves from any discussion except about the tunnel itself.”

So far, according to Associate Dean for Physical Planning David A. Zewinski ’76, one of Harvard’s three representatives on the committee, the University has yet to decide what changes could put on the negotiating table.

“It is difficult to say what is negotiable,” he writes in an e-mail.

Any cuts in the square-footage would require the approval of Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles, he says, as would a decision to give up classroom space by scaling back the building.

For the time being both sides say they are looking to the next step in the five-year-old process, toward hammering out a plan for CGIS acceptable to both sides.

According to Zewinski, Harvard’s three committee representatives met yesterday afternoon to talk about the next meeting.

And Sullivan says he hopes the negotiation process goes forward.

As for the mayor’s take on the first meeting—“people stayed in the room,” he says.

—Staff writer Lauren R. Dorgan can be reached at dorgan@fas.harvard.edu.