Physical Frontiers

This year has seen the first concrete advances in the University’s plan to further expand across the Charles River and into its Allston properties—though not an ounce of concrete will be poured for at least a few years. The current plans are still hazy; the newly released Interim Report prepared by architects Cooper, Robertson, & Partners has only set out more tangible representations of the rumored configurations circulating around campus. We now know, more or less for sure, that the University will build at least three, and perhaps up to eight, undergraduate houses across the river. The Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and School of Public Health are also probably slated to move. We know that the sciences are the implicit focus of the Allston move, with plans for hundreds of thousands of square footage devoted immediately to new science facilities, including the burgeoning Harvard Stem Cell Institute. We know now, without question, that the transformation will drastically change the Harvard undergraduate experience, and the institution itself on a fundamental level. The physical nature of campus has a lot to say about the campus itself.

As much as people like to say that the “thing” about Harvard is the people in it—the faculty and students and staff gathered here to the end of education—the physical body of an institution is an expression of its values, of its goals, of its personality and way of life. The impending plans of Harvard’s future physical body will be a diagram of what Harvard wishes to become as an institution, what it wishes to embody (literally). It is for this reason that Harvard’s transformation is of particular interest to undergraduates, many of whom will never see these plans realized as students. Students will carry Harvard with them for the rest of their lives, in whatever form it takes, so we have to hope that not only will it stay good, but it will get better.

And certainly, through Allston, Harvard can only get better. The currently fragmented University body—with its various protuberances stretching in all directions, nonlinear and hiccoughing in fragments across the Cantabridgian landscape—will finally have the opportunity to centralize, or at least become contiguous. Gone will be the days, one can write hopefully, of the Garden Street style Sporades of Harvard undergraduate buildings, the reality of the city intermittently interrupting the University’s plans for expansion and design. University President Lawrence H. Summers’ emphasis on centralization of the sprawling University and on facilitating interdisciplinary studies will find its physical embodiment in the Allston campus, and that is nothing to complain about.

Indeed, regardless of the scholastic and logistical advantages of a contiguous campus—broken by the River alone rather than by the city—there will be tremendous gains in terms of student life, if carried out properly. New Houses occupying real estate along the River, existing sports facilities be damned, would be tremendous for unifying the undergraduate experience: it would solve the “Quad Problem,” physically uniting the student body, and allow for the student body’s reasonable and comfortable expansion. Further, if the Allston plans have a centrally located student center in store, it could help create the energetic undergraduate unity that Harvard so sorely lacks and that the House system seems to disperse. With a strong system of transportation, ideally more efficient and regular than the current Quad shuttle system, the physical barriers of distance that currently impede student life—social and academic—could be taken down.

It would be foolish to only talk about Allston, however, when discussing the changing face of Harvard College and University: there are far more immediate alterations proceeding under our noses, ones which will impact many of us during our time as students at Harvard. The construction of graduate school housing on the site of a parking lot on Cowperthwaite Street, in the quite immediate vicinity of Leverett, Dunster, and Mather Houses, will certainly change the East River skyline, and the routine of many undergrads. While Harvard’s goal of housing 50 percent of graduate students by 2011 is a worthy one, it should only be achieved through the peaceful coexistence of current students and construction equipment. The transformation of the University with the aim of becoming better should never come at the expense of present quality.

The same could be said for the changes occurring in the Quadrangle. The Quad’s Hilles Library is transforming into the Quad Library—a single floor “library” without a librarian and with limited reserves—and student center, much to the chagrin of many current Quad residents who enjoy their personal study space. Likewise, the Quadrangle Recreational Athletic Center (QRAC) has been closed for most of last semester as some of its basketball courts are transformed into admittedly much-needed dance space—a change necessitated after the Radcliffe Institute reclaimed the Rieman Center for its own. In the end, a slimmed down Hilles Library complete with more student group space and rehearsal space as well as a refurbished QRAC could prove to be a plus for Quad residents; in the meantime, they’re feeling the pinch of Harvard’s growth and transformation.

The changing physicality of Harvard is certainly exciting: the prospect of new Houses, new laboratories for new discoveries, new performance space for the arts, is tantalizing in a way. With an institution such as Harvard, dramatic change is quite rare, and in that way, it is thrilling. Yet the University is entering rough waters with new challenges: raising funds, predicting future needs, and maintaining current services and standards through the process is certainly a tight-rope walk. The student body, the faculty, the staff, and the entire academic world will be watching and waiting with baited breath, as Harvard embarks on this new territory.