University Inches Toward Allston Decision

When Jones Professor of American Studies Lizabeth Cohen boarded a bus to tour Allston in late May, she was hardly embarking on the road less travelled.

Cohen, a member of the Physical Resources Committee of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), was following in the footsteps of many at Harvard—including members of the University’s two highest governing boards, the Corporation and the Overseers—all of whom have journeyed into the Allston in the past year.

Cohen and her fellow professors got a good look at Harvard’s huge holdings of land on the other side of the Charles river, the area that the Harvard’s top planners and University President Lawrence H. Summers have identified as the site of Harvard’s next campus.

Currently, the University’s acreage in Allston more closely resembles a patchwork of run-down commercial properties than a college campus—the parcel Harvard is most likely to build on first is currently crossed by railroad lines, dotted with gas stations and dominated by a large trucking facility.

Over the past few years, two main scenarios have emerged for Harvard’s future campus in Allston. One involves moving a a cluster of professional schools, anchored by the Harvard Law School (HLS). The other involves building a science campus with possible tie-ins to biotech.

While Dennis F. Thompson, chair of the University Physical Planning Committee (UPPC)—the Harvard-wide faculty committee charged with investigating scenarios for Allston planning—said at the beginning of the year that Summers and the Corporation were aiming to have some direction by the end of the summer.

But now, administrators say, the decision could take longer.

“It is becoming clear that the president is not going to get pinned down to make a major decision this summer,” says Vice President for Government, Community, and Public Affairs Alan J. Stone.

Meanwhile, the Allston planning process, supposed to be both widely consultative and highly centralized, has had to flex to accommodate schools’ desire to conduct their own studies of Allston.

And the committees meant to encourage University-wide—as opposed to school-by-school thinking—either withered or have uncertain futures.

Top administrators say it is unclear whether the UPPC will meet again next year.

Several provost’s advisory committees spun off of the UPPC to investigate specific options for Allston—such as housing, science, professional schools and cultural activities—have stopped meeting, and only one of the five has written a report.

And several of the schools that will be affected by Allston planning have formed their own committees to examine options on a school-by-school basis.

Where Have All the Committees Gone?

Originally slated for this summer, an Allston decision—which could be a prescription as specific as which schools would be moving, but also could be more of a general direction—was supposed to come on the heels of the release of reports from committees and consultants.

The groups were initially charged with formulating “criteria to be used in modeling scenarios for new institutional development in Allston...and to raise and respond to critical questions for determining the best way to provide space alternatives for the University’s future growth,” according to the draft of their missions.

According to Kathy Spiegelman, the director of the Allston initiative and the University’s top planner, the committees were instrumental.

“The UPPC met almost monthly this year, and my staff reads all the minutes, which try to summarize their discussions,” Spiegelman says. “They have worked alongside us, with architects, with engineers, doing a lot of technical analysis work...but it is up to the president to decide next fall if they are still need to do this work.”

Stone agrees, but could not confirm whether the UPPC would meet next year.

“Planning by nature goes in stages, and whether committees should disband and have new ones take their place is part of the process—there will be plenty of committees involved in Allston planning,” he says.

According to members of the committees, only the advisory group on housing wrote and submitted a formal report to the provost.

“We didn’t meet at all this semester,” said Emery Chemistry Professor Eric N. Jacobsen, who served on both of two committees on science planning. “And we produced no formal reports. All we did was discuss options, throw around ideas.”

Jacobsen says he met with University Provost Steven E. Hyman to ask why the groups had stopped meeting.

Professor in the Practice of Urban Design Alex B. Krieger, who served on the housing committee, stresses that the provost committees have limited power.

“These committees are supposedly framing ideas and making recommendations, but it is unclear that they have any other authority besides making recommendations to the provost,” he says.

Meanwhile, the San Francisco-based consulting firms that Harvard hired—Arup and SMWM—were both scheduled to finish their analyses by the end of the academic year, in time to provide direction for an Allston decision this summer.

But now, some professors say that the reports are not as conclusive as some hoped they would be.

“Not many insights were found in the study—it didn’t provide a lot of definitive answers,” says Krieger, who saw early drafts of the Arup report, which focused on transportation.

Spiegelman says that the consultants’ reports have opened up new questions in the Allston discussion.

“I am optimistic that as we wrap up [SMWM and Arup’s] work in the coming month, the president will find it useful,” she says.

Separation Anxiety

In the calculus of the professional school model versus the science model, FAS officials and even some University administrators say moving all of science is virtually infeasible due to the impact it would have on undergraduate classes.

And they say splitting science between Allston and the North Yard is not a good solution, either.

Science professors are particularly concerned about separating research from the teaching facilities.

“There is tremendous resistance to moving to Allston,” says McKay Professor of Applied Physics Efthimios Kaxiras. “The biggest problem would be separating the Chemistry and Physics and Engineering here. Science works in an interdisciplinary way—and if these facilities were housed differently, it would be a tremendous blow to the sciences at Harvard.”

“It would be a big mistake to move parts of science across the river,” he says.

One FAS committee took investigating Allston’s potential meaning for the school into its own hands.

The Faculty Resource Committee, composed of eight professors and four administrators, discussed concerns about moving FAS science to Allston at two of their meetings this semester.

Professors on the Resource Committee have seen several drafts of FAS proposals for Allston land.

“It won’t be solved all at once. We have to figure out what has to be contiguous to what, what the public needs access to,” says History of Science Professor Peter Galison, a member of the committee who calls the Allston problem “a three-dimensional chess game.”

A definitive FAS plan is still a long way down the line, professors say.

“The bottom line is that we’re not that there yet—and that’s how it should be,” says Cohen.

The Resource Committee discussions in Allston serve in part to inform a memo on FAS’s options in Allston that Former Dean of the Faculty Jeremy Knowles and Kirby are working on, Cohen says.

Cohen calls the memo Knowles and Kirby are working on “a talking document.”

“We are in the process on drafting a set of alternative plans for the president to consider for Allston,” Kirby says. “The president needs to have the best information he can have. He should know what are a set of alternative possibilities and what are the implications.”

In the meantime, FAS is finalizing plans and breaking ground on a number of new science facilities in the North Yard.

FAS scientists say that the University cannot wait until Allston planning is settled to build for the future of science.

“One of most pressing issues for FAS is the future of sciences. We can’t delay and sacrifice the sciences for 10 years,” Galison says.

Law School Planning

Several Harvard schools—FAS as well as at several of the smaller graduate schools—have quietly started committees, formal or informal, to discuss their own strategic interests during the upcoming University-wide process.

But the first committee formed to consider Allston from the viewpoint of a single school could not have been more high profile.

In 1999, the HLS faculty nearly went into an uproar at the thought of being forced out of Cambridge and into Allston. At the time, science had not yet been posed as a formal planning scenario for Harvard’s new land across the river, so HLS formed the centerpiece of the only option for an academic campus.

The faculty voted overwhelmingly against making a move.

HLS Dean Robert C. Clark appointed a committee to consider the school’s options, the high-profile Locational Options Committee, and chose Elena Kagan to head up the group.

HLS planners and FAS administrators may not agree on what should go to Allston, they do echo one another on two points: space in Cambridge is limited and in order to stay competitive, each needs more and better facilities.

“Our facilities are grossly inadequate for our current purposes, so we’re going to make changes to our campus, regardless of whether we end up moving to Allston or not,” says Kagan, who will assume the HLS deanship this summer.

This past fall, the so-called Kagan committee wrapped up a comprehensive report on what and where the law school could expand.

The report lays out different scenarios for the Law School here in Cambridge and across the river.

One option involves keeping the Law School on its current site, but expanding on this land by using student dorms for classroom and student space and moving the dorms across the river.

Other scenarios involve Allston even more prominently. In one scenario, the Law School would get the riverside property where the athletic fields currently are, pushing the athletes further into Allston. The two other options place the law school where the Business School dorms are currently or deeper into the city.

With plans for Allston still in the theoretical realm, the spotlight turns to the North Yard area, as Harvard expands onto neighboring Agassiz from all sides.

But unlike the planning processes of FAS sciences, those of HLS are just that—planning. No ground has yet been broken, but HLS planners see this as an opportunity to consult with the neighborhood before building anything.

“So far everything has gone very well,” Kagan adds. “We have worked very hard to get off onto the right foot and are making extensive efforts that engage them in our planning processes.”

For the Law School, the quiet, upper-middle-class Agassiz neighborhood has been a beloved home for many decades.

“Agassiz has been our home forever, and we have a deep interest in the community,” says Kagan, who is confident in HLS’s efforts to woo Agassiz neighbors, especially in comparison with FAS science, which has far more difficult tasks such as convincing neighbors to accept a new underground facility for storing about 60,000 mice.

“From the neighbor’s point of view, the only thing worse than lawyers is rats,” she quips.

Compared with a few years ago, Law professors are more open to moving across the river into Allston and leaving their precious 02138 zip code in the dust.

“There has been remarkably little talk about it,” says Beneficial Professor of Law Charles Fried.

The Stadium Stays

In a memo sent on college space needs sent to Spiegelman earlier this year, outgoing Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis ’68 argues that athletic fields should stay where they are, saying that “the location of our athletic facilities is one of our greatest distinctions.”

But planners still eye the athletic fields as prime property in Allston.

“It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the nicest land over in Allston is the athletic fields along the river,” says FAS Associate Dean for Physical Resources and Planning David A. Zewinski ’76.

Lewis took issue with the Law School’s argument that they need to stay close to the Yard and FAS.

“It was amusing to hear that the Law School was arguing that contiguity to the College was important, given that its faculty has offered much less to the College even than the Medical School faculty,” Lewis wrote in the memo.

But unlike Lewis, some planners are open to the idea of sacrificing the athletic fields for building expansion.

“Objectively, the practice fields are the least effectively used parts of land by the University—so it makes sense to build on them,” Zewinski says. “After all, it is easier to move fields than buildings.”

But Spiegelman says that the relocation of athletic fields would face several formidable hurdles.

“The land is very wet, you have to find somewhere else to put athletics. There’s a whole lot of concerns,” she says.

Spiegelman says she is also concerned about the many prominent alumni who support athletics.

According to Harris Band, the University’s director of planning, building on the marshy, riverside turf where athletics field are could potentially cost twice as much as building on dry ground would.

Zewinski, who was a varsity athlete himself in his college days at Harvard, says that he is comforted knowing that the stadium “is a fixture, and protected as a historic landmark.”

“I think Bill Kirby, Dick Gross, and Larry Summers have a real appreciation, and that is good to know—I think the decision on the fields will be in good hands,” Zewinski says.

Did You Ever Have To Make Up Your Mind?

While individual schools ponder their plans, the University’s top administration has a big decision to make—even if they don’t stick to the original August deadline.

Krieger says that while leaders at some schools like the Graduate School of Design, the School of Public Health and the Graduate School of Education, have expressed interest in making a cross-river move, he says that these schools are “peanuts,” and do not represent large enough entities to create a real campus alone.

“The University is probably saying that we need someone with bigger revenue to move first,” Krieger says.

Krieger speculates that the recent slow-down with Allston planning stemmed from a realization that there was slightly more growth potential in Cambridge than previously thought.

“Things seemed to have shifted from ‘We need to do something tomorrow,’ to ‘Let’s hold on and just wait some now,’” says Krieger.

In the meantime, faculty and administrators at schools across the University are biding their time and crossing their fingers.

“We are just holding our breaths at this point—we’ve taken our best shot [with the Locational Options Report] and we’ve done our part and now it’s out of our hands,” Fried says.

—Staff Writer Jessica Rubin-Wills contributed to the reporting of this story.

—Staff Writer Lauren A. E. Schuker can be reached at schuker@fas.harvard.edu.