City Planning: Better Homes and Gardens

During its relatively brief stay at the corner of Boylston St. and Memorial Drive, the Kennedy School of Government has become famous for wide-eyed enthusiasm and galloping growth. The arrival of an additional 240 students and 17 professors, giftwrapped as the City and Regional Planning (CRP) program and jettisoned by the overpopulated Graduate School of Design (GSD), will certainly uphold this tradition of expansion. In fact, the move may necessitate readjustments on such a grand scale that even the K-School's wizards of bureaucracy will have to scramble to keep up.

The casual pedestrian will notice nothing more than a pronounced bulge of red bricl and glass emerging from the K-School and creeping toward the Square. In fact, CRP classes will remain in Gund Hall until the construction is completed in late 1982. But deep within Harvard's showpiece graduate school Dean Graham T. Allison Jr. '62 and his colleagues will be thrashing through a major reevaluation of the institution's educational goals.

Although the announcement of the shift surprised faculty members and students at both schools, its origins date back at least ten years.

CRP emphasized the physical aspects of city planning through most of the 1960s. When broader social and economic problems began to limit architectural options at the turn of the decade, its focus shifted to training and research in public policy. While the K-School initiated a separate Public Policy program, the GSD recruited an increasing number of CRP students for their interest in administration, not design. By the mid '70s bureaucratic theory had eclipsed architecture within CRP. Gerald M. McCue, dean-designate of the GSD, remembers that "our CRP program had become 80 per cent public policy analysis and 20 per cent planning. Both the students and the faculty looked more and more like those at the Kennedy School."

John M. Kain, chairman of CRP, agrees with McCue's analysis, adding that "the move is not a new idea. It just seemed like it would never happen because of money and logistics." President Bok says he was unaware of the extent of the rift until last summer, when he toured the GSD during his search for a new dean. Discovering "two very different cultures within the school which were not interacting," Bok announced last fall his decision to transfer CRP to the K-School this July. Despite Kain's claim that such a step was long-awaited, many students and teachers at both schools balked when they realized that the planned CRP exodus would cause tremendous in-conveniences.

GSDers felt their architectural roots might shrivel and die in the well-carpeted K-School turf, while the hosts-to-be trembled at the thought of accommodating so many new lodgers. Much of this initial wariness disappeared after hours of conferences and committee meetings, but a good deal of caution remains. "Everybody doesn't agree with the move, but a vast majority feel this is the correct thing to do," says McCue. His counterpart, Allison, adds that "at first blush, our reaction was, 'Look, we're full up. We don't need this.' Later, everyone became persuaded of the logic of the president's case."

Students were somewhat shocked that no one asked for their opinion before any decisions were made. "Most of us see it as a fait accompli handed down by President Bok. Many of us disagreed with that sort of process," says Joe Leitman, who represents the K-School student committee which has debated the issue for several months. Having set their initial indignation aside, students responding to a survey distributed by Leitman's committee were "mostly positive," he says.

The vacuum created by CRP's absence will allow everyone in Gund Hall a little more space to spread his blueprints while McCue and company rethink the whole approach to urban design. The next dean expects a reshuffling of faculty members and courses and the addition of several new instructors. He adds that other universities may follow Harvard's example in pruning overgrown public policy projects.

McCue's main worry is the trail of tuition dollars that will drift out of his grasp as the CRP students troop across campus. Allison, on the other hand, has so many administrative knots to untangle that he sees the millions needed for expansion as only one element of "a classic list of problems." First, he and his faculty must decide how to integrate CRP into the Public Policy program while reassuring students such as Scott Muldavin who say, "CRP people are concerned that they will be delegated to second banana over at the Kennedy School." Echoing McCue, Allison says he expects a general reexamination of his school's goals to emerge from the upcoming changes. William F. Hogan, professor of Political Economy and a leader of the pro-transfer lobby within the K-School, em-phasizes the opportunity the overhaul will present: "We ought to look at all of our programs and see how they could be related to public policy."

Of the many administrative complications engendered by the shift, the merging of admissions procedures may prove the most onerous. Leitman says that some K-Schoolers are worried that "the quality of the degree would be diluted because of laxer admissions standards (for CRP students)." Specifically, some of those involved in the transfer process believe that CRP students will struggle to keep up in courses using mathematics. Dorothy E. Bambach, dean of students at the K-School, disagrees vehemently: "The business of their not being able to keep in quantitative scores is just a lot of smoke. It's unnecessarily demeaning to their program to imply that there is a caliber problem with their students."

Bambach also stresses that she and her co-workers will step up their effort to disprove critics' claims that the K-School is not concerned about affirmative action. She says that "to a minority student this place could look like a white male bastion--this situation is more a matter of appearance than intent or policy," and adds that affirmative action policies "are not different at the two schools... We both stand to improve on implementation."

"Implementation" will remain the key word over the next five years for the leaders of the K-School, and not only in the crusade for more minority faces in the Forum. The grand plans for the new decade are very far from becoming reality.