Cleaning up the Mess

At a four-and-a-half hour meeting over breakfast and lunch last week, representatives from Harvard and MIT sat down with Cambridge officials to hash out their respective relationships with the city, which have been hostile more often than friendly in past years.

Each school took a few moments to explain its own power structures with the aid of organizational charts drawn on giant Post-it Notes.

In contrast to MIT’s tidy pyramid, Harvard’s diagram showed a sprawling, wildly-branching tree.

Vice President for Government, Community and Public Affairs Alan J. Stone gave his best shot at explaining Harvard’s bureaucracy.

“I think our University is the most decentralized major institution in the history of life,” Stone joked.

Sprouting off from the president, 11 branches represented the deans of each individual school at Harvard. To explain the deans, Stone used the oft-cited medieval kingdom analogy for Harvard’s power centers.

“The dean of FAS actually has a fiefdom bigger than most universities,” Stone explained, pointing to the branch labelled Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Adding to the branches were the five limbs representing the University’s vice presidents, each of whom keeps watch over some set of administrative functions, like legal or custodial services not accomplished by the individual schools, Stone explained.

“The lowly portfolio on the far left is my shop, which does press communications, federal lobbying and community relations,” Stone said, explaining what some call the “three legs of the stool” of his office.

Though he was joking when he said his job had a “lowly” place, Stone’s offhand remark reveals the deep-seated truth about the University’s approach to community relations.

For the office of community relations—those who attempt to display one united University face to the outside world—its greatest challenge is in dealing with the diffusion of the University’s power.

On the one hand, each dean or school has its own set of priorities and goals in its relationships with Cambridge and Boston.

But the efforts of the community relations office are also stymied within Mass. Hall by other offices of the central administration. Those responsible for community relations are left out of key discussions, and the hurdles those decisions erect are more of an afterthought than a primary consideration.

Secrets in Allston

Issues of Harvard’s land ownership and use are typically central to the University’s relationship with Cambridge and Boston, and form the bulk of the problems the community relations office must address.

Harvard has faced local anger each time it has purchased new property and years worth of difficult negotiations every time it has set out to build something.

Yet, those who make real estate and building decisions for the University are not directed by those who lead the community relations efforts.

Such lack of coordination characterized the University’s efforts to acquire land in Allston for Harvard’s 21st-century growth.

Robert Silverman, who directed Harvard’s Office of Planning in the late 1980s, engineered the Allston plan.

After extensive research, he came to the conclusion that the University was quickly running out of land in Cambridge and could not continue growing much longer unless new options were found.

He decided that Harvard should look to Allston, and that in buying up parcels of industrial land across the river in Allston, the University would provide for its future growth.

Before he left in 1988, Silverman presented his findings to Vice President for Administration Sally Zeckhauser, who in turn presented the idea to the Harvard Corporation, the University’s highest governing body.

With the Corporation’s approval, Zeckhauser led a top-secret movement to buy up parcels of land in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Zeckhauser selected the Beal Companies, a Boston-based real estate development company, to purchase and hold Allston parcels on Harvard’s behalf.

Harvard kept its interest in the land quiet in order to avoid price-gouging from sellers, Zeckhauser says.

In June 1997, when Harvard divulged its secret purchase of 52 acres across the river in Allston, an uproar erupted in Boston.

“That’s absurd,” Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino told the Boston Globe at the time. “Without informing anyone or telling anybody? That’s total arrogance.”

But Harvard didn’t just make its land purchases in Allston without the knowledge of city leaders and residents.

It made most of the deals without telling its own community relations officials, who would have to deal with the angry neighbors.

When Harvard began secretly purchasing Allston land in 1988, John H.F. Shattuck, a specialist in federal relations, was at the helm of Harvard’s Office of Government, Community and Public Affairs.

Zeckhauser says that Shattuck was informed about the Allston purchases at the same time as the rest of the vice presidents.

Shattuck, who left Harvard in 1993, says he did not know about the purchases for most of his term and in fact didn’t think that the purchases began until “pretty much as I was leaving.”

But Kathy Spiegelman, the current associate vice president for planning and real estate, pegs 1993 as the last of six years during which Allston plots were purchased.

And while Shattuck places the purchase primarily after his term, his successor, James H. Rowe ’74, says the Allston land dates from before his days at Harvard.

“The acquisition of the Boston acreage was something that was done to the great majority during the Bok administration,” says Rowe, a federal relations specialist who was hired three years into the administration of 26th University President Neil L. Rudenstine.

Rowe says he was for a time kept in the dark about the Allston land.

The purchases were “not something I was told [about] on day one,” he says.

But before the 1997 public announcement, Rowe says he learned that the land had been bought, and advocated with others, including Rudenstine, that the purchases be made public.

A year after the announcement and public relations fiasco, Rowe left and Paul S. Grogan—a hired gun with political experience with Boston city government—came in to patch up Harvard’s relationship with the city.

Although Grogan stayed at Harvard for only a brief two-and-a-half years, by all accounts he did the job he was hired to do—build connections from Mass. Hall to Boston City Hall, ties that endures to this day.

In addition to working with local politicians and civic leaders, Grogan says he also worked with deans and University officials to bring community relations closer to the fore.

“There’s a tendency of the University to think of the external affairs as not really central,” Grogan says. “I wanted to try to elevate the importance of what we were doing.”

When Harvard made a highly public bid for a plot in Allston owned by the Turnpike Authority, Grogan says he worked with Zeckhauser from the get-go on every detail of the purchase.

But Grogan’s term saw no structural changes in the authority over the offices in charge of community relations and planning, providing no assurance that future vice presidents for government, community and public affairs would be in the know about land purchases.

And with University President Lawrence H. Summers’ selection of Stone, who has focused this year on the media and public affairs aspect of the job, real estate decisions could once again be absent from the community affairs office’s radar screen.

Red Line in the Sand

While the community relations office wasn’t consulted before purchases began in Allston, in an earlier era the office actually set the University’s planning agenda.

In 1972, Harvard’s first-ever Vice President for Government, Community and Public Affairs Charles U. Daly set out to “clean up Harvard’s act a little bit.”

He says he had heard “all kinds of rumors about this gigantic University not paying up that much taxes and gobbling up all these communities”—rumors that he set out to quash.

So Daly released an unprecedented report disclosing the exact holdings of the University and created a tight boundary beyond which Harvard said it would not purchase residential properties—commonly known as the “red line.”

The University had promised to keep to the red line boundary for five years, but after the timeline was extended once, the promise eventually expired in 1979—and was not replaced with any similar guarantee.

The red line still influences Harvard’s building decisions and, more broadly, its relationship with the community. To this day, Harvard community relations officials hasten to point out how they follow the old red line agreement.

And the promise of limiting Harvard’s expansion did improve relations with Cambridge residents.

Even though some Cantabrigians reacted with anger when they found out what Harvard owns, Daly recalls, “the stronger reaction was ‘that’s not so bad’ or ‘now at least we know.’”

Daly says his red line was unpopular with the University’s builders and planners, but that wasn’t his concern.

“Once that’s done and it’s done in the name of the president of the University, people would have a difficult time not following that,” Daly says.

Come Together? Not Over Me

Unlike Harvard, other prestigious urban universities have a system in which at least one administrator short of the president oversees both planning and community relations.

And these officials at other schools do seem to personally take charge over both areas.

Harvard ordinarily sends second-tier administrators to community meetings or, for more important meetings, Stone and perhaps an administrator from one of the individual schools.

Columbia University’s Executive Vice President for Administration Emily Lloyd, who heads up all the non-academic aspects of the university from student services to real estate, personally does the tough negotiations on building projects.

Lloyd says that having someone with decision-making power at the bargaining table allows for easier compromise and better long-term town-gown relationships.

“In dealing with the community, you have to have someone at the table who’s authorized to make actual changes in the project,” Lloyd says.

But from Lloyd’s cursory observations, which she tracks through her subscription to Harvard Magazine, she believes that Harvard’s negotiation with neighbors comes later in the game and with less actual give and take than the process at Columbia.

On the other side of Cambridge, MIT’s Executive Vice President for Administration John R. Curry, who oversees his university’s finances and buildings, effectively heads up its community relations team.

Curry says he has a “very large stake” in maintaining a good relationship between MIT and Cambridge, and thus coordinates MIT’s real estate and community affairs offices.

A year and a half ago, MIT bought Tech Square—a bustling center for biotech in Cambridge—a move that surprised and angered city councillors, who feared the non-profit institution would take the cash cow off of the property tax rolls.

Right now, Curry heads up MIT’s team to negotiate a new payment in lieu of taxes, known in town-gown shorthand as a PILOT agreement, with Cambridge and a more general agreement in light of the Tech Square purchase.

But at Harvard, many say no one high-level administrator could encompass both building and community relations interests.

The current debate over the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ planned Center for Government and International Studies demonstrates the lack of such an individual at Harvard. The project is currently held up in negotiations over city council permission to build a tunnel under Cambridge Street.

“If [Dean of the Faculty] Jeremy Knowles says, ‘No, I don’t want to compromise anything,’ it’s no different that I’m in the room,” Spiegelman says.

With so much power coming from so many far-flung branches, the community relations team must go to meetings knowing exactly what they can offer to give up.

“Alan [Stone] will say, ‘What kind of latitude do I have?’” Zeckhauser says. “What happens is, sometimes people don’t give them very much flexibility.”

The Jury’s Still Out

In December, Harvard announced a highly-controversial purchase of a housing development off Memorial Drive on land formerly owned the Polaroid Company, which local activists had hoped could be used to alleviate Cambridge’s housing crunch.

Half a year later, the University is already advertising the housing development in Harvard Magazine.

The property’s purchase has remained an open wound, which neighborhood activists point to as a renewed symbol of Harvard’s greed and a new reason to distrust their institutional neighbor.

At last week’s town-gown meeting, city councillor Anthony D. Galluccio straightforwardly asked Harvard how the decision to buy the project was made.

“How does a Polaroid get purchased?” Galluccio asked. “Maybe a dean has a need that’s been building for years. I understand the complexity—you have cranky deans, unhappy deans.”

Then Galluccio asked the key question: “But doesn’t the president make the decisions on most of that stuff?”

While Summers theoretically does have this power, his involvement in day-to-day Cambridge planning and community relations matters has been extremely limited.

The truth is, Stone readily admits, there is a trade-off between letting people in on the tentative plan early and getting the deal done before letting the neighbors know, as the University did in Allston and, on a smaller scale, with the Polaroid housing development.

That approach means that when a Harvard town-gown controversy flares, it’s not always by accident. It’s a calculated move that sacrifices the University’s credibility for its long-term aspirations.

“The jury’s out over whether that’s the best strategy,” Stone says. “Sometimes you just can’t avoid bad press.”

—Staff writer Lauren R. Dorgan can be reached at dorgan@fas.harvard.edu.