Keeping Harvard Together

For a campus beleaguered with space constraints, the open frontier in Allston brings welcome relief. Students in cramped houses, professors in understaffed departments and the ardent supporters of a student center can now hope for a new era at Harvard. Once the University expands into its spacious holdings in Allston—totaling more than all the University’s Cambridge land—space will be freed on both sides of the river. But while expansion offers many obvious advantages for Harvard, it will pose significant challenges that will require creative, foresighted administrative planning. Expanding into Allston must be done carefully in order to prevent sprawl from undermining the intellectual gestalt of the University, from fragmenting it into an array of solitary islands.

Harvard’s intellectual richness is derived in part from its wide array of graduate schools. The University is a center for study in countless fields, but it has never been adept at facilitating dialogue between its independent parts. Undergraduates are rarely able to take advantage of the wealth of opportunities in the nearby graduate schools, and graduate students often find it difficult to study in other schools or at the College.

Intellectual isolation among schools is a problem today, but the expansion into Allston threatens to exacerbate it. The administration has hinted that entire graduate schools will be relocated across the river, and logistically, moving schools intact makes the most sense. Professors and students within a graduate school share intellectual interests and resources in order to pursue common goals, and it makes little sense to force students to take a bus to get from one class to another. In addition, concentrating graduate school campuses in one area would foster community among graduate students, improving both their quality of life and the scope of their scholarship.

Understandably, many schools have been reluctant to take the plunge and volunteer to cross the river. Tradition and established infrastructure combine to make a move costly and inconvenient. But these hindrances apply to some graduate schools more than others, leaving several schools as viable candidates for a move. The Graduate School of Education (GSE) and Harvard Law School both stand to gain tremendously from a move to Allston, and they occupy prime real estate in Cambridge that would be valuable to the expanding College.

GSE has recently come under the leadership of Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, who has announced her intentions to make the next several years a period of growth and change. The fragmented campus of GSE would benefit both from consolidation across the river and from the increased capital necessary to allow Lagemann to make dynamic changes in the school. Combined with an increased commitment of funding and resources, a move to Allston would help GSE make many of the improvements it needs.

The Law School, which needs more space to expand its faculty, could stretch its legs across the river. A consolidated, improved campus would help administrators in their efforts to improve community among law students, and relocating the law school near the business school would also facilitate collaboration between the two related disciplines.

In addition to moving GSE and the Law School, several museums and science labs should move across the river. The museums will help improve community relations with Allston, attracting tourism and opening the University to the city’s residents. The science facilities are desperately in need of space to expand and improve; state-of-the-art labs built across the river will have room to grow as new subjects of inquiry arise.

But there will be significant downsides to moving these schools across the river, for which the University must prepare. A physical separation of graduate schools from the College will most likely worsen the existing intellectual gaps between the schools, further eroding the already tenuous connection students feel in belonging to a common university. Interdisciplinary dialogue, which Harvard has begun to promote through programs such as Mind, Brain and Behavior, will be made more difficult by moving schools away from the heart of campus. Undergraduates will find it harder to take advantage of the wealth of opportunities afforded by the graduate schools when they are no longer in walking distance. The University runs the risk of becoming divided into schools that rarely interact, exist independently and share little but name.

Thus, the administration must take action now to alleviate these unfortunate side effects of a necessary expansion. It must endorse and strengthen current interdisciplinary programs while creating new ones as the opportunity arises to solidify bridges between graduate schools and the College. It should plan convenient transportation services to ease the commute for scholars shuttling between schools. It should develop a reliable website to inform all students about important Harvard-wide events—and it must ensure that all schools promote such events and publicize them across the University. These steps will help reinforce the sense that while Harvard’s schools are independent, they are all part of the same university.

Although graduate students currently reside near undergraduates, there is very little communication between the graduate schools and the College. Only very motivated students wind up taking advantage of the resources afforded by the graduate schools because the University makes minimal effort to encourage interaction. Moving graduate schools to Allston risks making this problem much worse. There are no easy solutions to this dilemma, but the administration must pay close attention to these costs. Even as graduate schools move away and grow, the administration must develop concrete strategies to keep Harvard whole.