From Off the Wall to On the Table: Planners Consider Allston Houses

In what would be a monumental change for a College that has existed solely in Cambridge for over 350 years, planners are now envisioning building undergraduate housing across the river in Allston.

Once an off-the-wall proposition—former President Neil L. Rudenstine rejected moving any part of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) from Cambridge—putting upperclass Houses in Allston is now not only on the table but seen as an integral part of Harvard’s campus of the future.

Under a plan that presidential adviser Dennis F. Thompson presented to deans, top administrators and University President Lawrence H. Summers in July, the College would tie together a disparate mix of science, graduate housing, cultural activities and professional schools to be built in Allston.

Although the plan’s undergraduate component was far from definite, it offered two concrete options for expanding the College into Allston, sources present at the meeting said.

The first would replace the Houses that currently make up the Radcliffe Quad with three new ones in Allston, while keeping the number of undergraduate beds the same.

The other would increase the size of the student body by adding new Houses on the other side of the river.

Either scenario would mean the first expansion of the House system since Mather and Currier Houses were constructed in 1970.

The proposal has caught the majority of the College by surprise—and has already begun to provoke opposition.

Several House masters—who had not heard that either option was being considered by the Harvard administration—said putting undergraduates in Allston seemed a risky proposition.

“I dread the thought of emptying a House and using it for something else,” Eliot House Master Lino Pertile said.

“Oh, God, don’t you think we have enough trouble with the Quad, people thinking it’s study abroad or something,” Quincy House Master Robert Kirshner quipped.

Undergraduate Council President Rohit Chopra ’04 responded to the news of the Quad’s potential relocation in a post to the Council e-mail list: “It seems that the inmates are now completely in charge of the asylum.”

“One of the great things we have here is that our housing is located close to each other and close to our classes,” Chopra said in an interview this weekend.

“I’m nearly positive that a relocation of the Quad is not going to happen,” he added. “It makes so little sense that it can’t happen.”

Allstoning the Quad

But those involved in the Allston planning process describe clear advantages to locating undergraduate housing in Allston.

FAS is likely to put up a vigorous fight if the University attempts to co-opt its athletic buldings and fields—prime Allston real estate—for a professional school.

Former Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis ’68 fired the first shot in that battle, when he argued strenously against displacing the athletic fields in a memo to Allston planners last February.

“The location of [the College’s] athletic fields is one of our greatest distinctions” and moving them further away would risk “a much greater dissociation of the athletic experience from the rest of college life,” he wrote.

When the University Physical Planning Committee—the lead faculty group considering Allston plans—discussed moving the Quad Houses last spring, the land where athletic buildings now stand was seen as a potential site, committee member Alan Altshuler said.

FAS—and its donors—might be more receptive to moving athletic space if the replacement were College housing.

Aside from political considerations, planners and professors hope that an undergraduate presence in Allston would link Harvard’s soon-to-be two campuses. They envision students providing a constant flow of activity back and forth across the Charles.

When the planning committee discussed moving the Quad, Altshuler said, “a number of people did think it sounded like a very attractive idea.”

“It was appealing for several reasons,” said Altshuler, the Stanton professor in urban policy and planning at the Kennedy School of Government.

“One, it would be very attractive housing; two, it would be very close to the existing undergraduate housing complex; and three, it would reinforce the idea that Allston was going to be a precinct with as much appeal as Cambridge over time.”

Quad Houses, emptied of their undergraduates, could be used for more graduate student housing.

Director of the Allston Initiative Kathy A. Spiegelman said July 16 that the concept of moving undergradate Houses was “predicated on the idea of integrating the campus.”

This weekend, Spiegelman declined to comment specifically on the plan that Thompson, who chairs the physical planning committee, presented to the deans.

Pforzheimer House Master James J. McCarthy said he did not think the distance between Harvard Yard and Allston was an “overwhelming obstacle” compared with students’ current walk back and forth from the Quad.

The Yard’s John Harvard statue is approximately the same distance from the Quad and the athletic fields.

Jones Professor of American Studies Lizabeth Cohen, a member of the FAS Physical Resources Committee, said that while she had heard nothing of plans to put undergraduates in Allston, she assumed it would allow Harvard to “recreate the Cambridge ambience of mixed housing, culture, commercial [areas] and classrooms.”

But Cohen said any near-term increase in the number of undergraduates would be counterproductive.

“I think that would be totally crazy, since we’re trying to expand the number of faculty,” she said. “We would be defeating the whole purpose of improving the faculty-student ratio.”

According to McCarthy, Summers is said to be interested in expanding the College.

Neither Summers nor University spokespeople would comment for this story.

While declining to comment directly on the new Allston plan, Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71 assured that any student growth would be equaled by faculty growth.

“Obviously, we can’t seriously increase the size of the undergraduate student body without also increasing the size of the Faculty,” he wrote in an e-mail. “Much of the discussion so far has been about where we want to be 20-30 years from now.”

Summers will announce a decision this fall that could determine the fate of undergraduate housing in Allston.

—Staff writer Elisabeth S. Theodore can be reached at theodore@fas.harvard.edu.