Students Will Protest Building

At a late-night meeting on Tuesday, about 20 students gathered in Dunster Dining Hall to launch a campaign against the noise, safety risks, and aesthetic issues they fear will come along with the construction of new graduate student housing on Cowperthwaite Street.

Iliana Montauk ’06, a Dunster resident who organized the meeting, said she thought there was “a really good chance” their actions will have an effect.

“Students came into this thinking there was nothing they could do, but when they heard there was something they could do, they felt energized,” said Montauk, who is also a Crimson editor.

Dunster House Co-Master Ann Porter and Dunster superintendent Joseph O’Connor were also at the meeting.

Cambridge residents Alan Joslin and Rick Lamb were present to explain to students the neighborhood’s contentious history with the project and share strategies for putting their concerns into action.

After years of neighborhood resistance to developing the site, the University and the City signed an agreement in October 2003, which will allow Harvard to build a six-story graduate student housing complex opposite Dunster and Mather in addition to smaller units throughout the Riverside neighborhood.

Though early-morning noise weighs most heavily on the minds of students, they also said the building would compromise their safety, sense of community, and privacy.

Students specifically targeted the height and width of the building, which will obstruct light and significantly diminish the pathway and park behind Leverett, a path many students take to and from Dunster and Mather Houses.

These problems are “exactly the ones the community feels most pained about as well,” Joslin said.

“If Harvard came forward and said we want to make the building smaller, there would be complete support from the neighborhood, the Planning Board and the City Council,” he added.

“Had we known [that students cared], we would have rallied you to the cause,” Joslin said. “It would have been a wonderful collaboration.”

The students have already created an open e-mail list for discussions about the problem. They hope to organize a petition, meet with University President Lawrence H. Summers, and publicize their cause in campus publications. Montauk also suggested that the Undergraduate Council organize a subcommittee to more exhaustively address student concerns with construction.

“If anything characterizes Harvard in the next decade, it’s expansion,” Montauk said. “If the precedent we set is that we’ll let Harvard just roll over us, that will negatively impact all the future construction that takes place.”

—Staff writer Natalie I. Sherman can be reached at nsherman@fas.harvard.edu. ­