Buh-Bye, Allston
Posted on December 10th, 2009 in Uncategorized | 21 Comments »
To no one’s surprise, you can stick a fork in Harvard’s Allston campus—it’s done.
Harvard Mag reports,
…Harvard is in effect rebooting its planning effort for that expansion overall, implying a longer deferral of Allston development—and raising the prospect of significant changes from the prior vision of new homes for Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), a cultural and performing-arts complex, additional and expansive laboratories, and other facilities.
What a sad and difficult and fascinating moment for Harvard. After decades of educational supremacy, the university, largely because of fiscal mismanagement, is getting hammered. From faculty retirements to staff retirements and layoffs to undergraduates without hot food to the demise of campus expansion, Harvard has been ravaged by financial losses.
The only question, really, is whether any other university is in a position to surpass it—or whether Stanford, Yale and others are equally hampered.
Regardless, this announcement makes clear that Harvard’s golden age is over. How long will the rebuilding process be?
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Addendum: Sigh. The Globe gets the story completely wrong here. No, education reporter Tracy Jan, it’s not just that Harvard isn’t going to build the science center; the university is bowing out of the entire project and reevaluating the entire plan.
Hmmm. Columbia has the money to build but can’t buy the land. Harvard has the land but not the money. Perhaps Columbia should give up on Harlem and think about Allston?
21 Responses
12/10/2024 5:03 pm
Please, Richard. You are being way too overdramatic. This is not a particularly meaningful turning point, nor is Harvard being ravaged. I’d call it “disappointing” at worst.
And I don’t think I agree that Harvard’s golden age was in the 2000s, but even if we stipulate that it was, then that “golden age” could not possibly have anything to do with Allston. It would have been the golden age because of what faculty or students were doing, not because HRES bought 150 acres from the MBTA.
12/10/2024 5:13 pm
I am on leave at Stanford this year, and there is no comparison. Stanford is going full steam ahead on building (it’s incredible really) and no one here is feeling concerned about the endowment losses, which seem to have been managed much better. Morale here seems unimpaired-the difference between Harvard and Stanford is really obvious even time I go back to Cambridge as I frequently do. I do not know how Yale is faring from personal experience, but my colleagues there are not expressing at all similar anxiety as we at Harvard.
12/10/2024 6:39 pm
Dunno, 5.13 — one has heard Stanford people say quite the opposite.
12/10/2024 6:43 pm
Every Harvard president since Rudenstine has said Harvard’s future is in Allston — and some have said that’s thinking 50 or 100 years ahead. The land remains Harvard’s, and exciting things can start (or resume) there anytime, and even if that means it won’t be First Science in the year 2011 there are lots of possibilities and good reason for excitement. Richard’s glee is the most wrongheaded take I’ve seen on this subject.
12/10/2024 6:48 pm
Glee? I think I used the words “sad and difficult.” Not much glee there. I think it’s really a shame; I also think this is a watershed era for Harvard, and if folks don’t recognize that, they are sticking their head in the snow.
Also, anyone who thinks that Allston can just start up on a dime once the project has been shelved is also not thinking clearly.
12/10/2024 7:09 pm
Richard, your calling it “the project” reflects limited thinking. There are many potential projects, (with some as yet unconceived) with a lot of creative and dynamic people working on them, and some of them will be far more flexible and faster than what we started with.
12/10/2024 10:23 pm
Maybe it was the wrong idea from the beginning and at least the present circumstances allow for a “graceful’ retreat.
The property perhaps will either stay on the tax rolls or go back on the tax rolls which makes for a better relationship with Boston. And then in turn allows for much more expansion in the Longwood area (where the science really belongs.)
Dorms and affordable housing will be the final outcome of Allston in the long run.
12/11/2023 2:43 pm
The Allston initiative did not start as a research park, but morphed into a $10-15 billion behemoth after the law school faculty overwhelmingly rejected the notion of relocating its campus in Allston. Larry seized upon this to reposition Allston into a crazy cocked grandiose scheme to cure cancer and impact the world of medical science. As he encountered opposition he would throw a billion dollar bone here and there to every group to buy there support, including the plan to build new undergraduate houses and move the athletic facilities. So, yes, the plan was nutty from the start and a little pro forma analysis of the costs of competing with Pfizer and J&J would have stopeed the project dead in its tracks; that is, if the Corporation members had displayed an ounce of common sense or exercised even a modicum of care.
12/11/2023 3:07 pm
It’s my impression that most people at HSPH would prefer to stay in the Longwood area so I doubt there will be many complaints from HSPH about the Allston announcement.
Was the Allston plan the wrong idea as Or put it? To the extent that it was imposed from above and did not grow out of a broadly based interdisciplinary consensus about what Harvard is and should be, I think it was a mistake. Again, it’s about planning, the composition of the group that creates the plan, and how they view Harvard.
The point that we are kept in the dark about plans for Harvard’s future and how it will address its immediate problems has been forcefully made in recent comments under “You’re Not Alone”. I keep wondering what must happen before this situation changes.
12/11/2023 8:53 pm
Allston was a non-starter from the beginning, as anything but an annexe, graduate student bedroom community/non-teaching science facility/off-site library/museum storage facility, etc.
I remember being on Faculty Council in ?2002-3 and being asked to come to a presentation, in the dead of exam period, I think it was, in the Faculty Club. Everett Mendelsohn and I (the only ones who turned up) got a tour from about ten suits as they explained the various options. There were three possible scenarios wheeled out, none of them likely in my view to create a community in Allston.
It was agreed you had to get undergraduates hanging out at the intersection of Western Ave and JFK, turning VW lot/drycleaners/White Hen into attractive cafes, etc. You would need to put three undergrad houses to the north of the football stadium, and that might do it, as you prayed they would make a right turn onto JFK at 10 p.m., rather than a left towards Harvard Square and the other 70% of the undergraduate body.
It seemed ridiculous at the time, and obviously IS ridiculous now. Meanwhile, thanks in large part to the “vision” of LHS, and to how Harvard went about “funding” all of this, a great university is under serious threat.
Imagine being able to turn back the clock 10 years.
12/11/2023 9:25 pm
Imagine if the faculty who now see so clearly everything that went wrong over the last 10 years had spoken up right then and there.
12/11/2023 9:35 pm
How do you stop Harvard faculty to settle down?
Raise their salaries!
You will seen see salaries raised. This and the early retirement packages should quiet things down.
12/11/2023 10:13 pm
9:25: We did, but were told Allston was not our business, which it technically wasn’t.
Interesting syntax and orthography, 9:35.
12/11/2023 10:32 pm
One professor who saw things clearly (in my opinion) did speak up even though it technically wasn’t his business
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2007/6/7/allston-dreams-allston-is-the-hope/
Instead of fantasizing aobut turning back the clock, how about resolving to make a better future out of this mess?
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2009/12/9/harvard-allston-brighton-harvards/
Small geography note:
The road in Cambridge is JFK St
The road in Allston that continues south to Western Ave is called North Harvard St.
12/12/2023 4:05 am
Do read the op-ed by Harry Lewis and Fred Abernathy in today’s Globe, everyone:
http://tinyurl.com/ydt9mae
And anonymous 9:25, you’ll see in that op-ed mention of one person who did see things clearly back then: Caroline Hoxby. I believe she was on a long-range planning committee at the time, and thus knew something of Harvard’s financial situation. Most of us were carefully protected from such knowledge.
12/12/2023 8:27 am
RT, you make a strong case. However, there are other ways of building “community” than just where the undergrads live & hang out. There are the Allstonians, grad students, researchers, any combination of groups: some vision could, and still can, work. Maybe not LHS’s. But Harvard has no other place to expand or to adapt: it ain’t Cambridge no more, it’s these acres on the other side of the river. Harvard in 100 years will look different from anything we can imagine, just as it does or would now for the Harvardians of 1909. Some vision is needed — although maybe not now. Maybe that was LHS’s mistake, not to give the time and care for a sustainable Allston vision to emerge.
12/12/2023 9:37 am
The Allston plan, such as it was, never made any sense, and numerous faculty members said so at the time. When Summers initially met with the FAS resources committee, soon after his appointment, to discuss Allston, he heard non-stop objections. Result: he froze out the members of the resources committee who had had the temerity to raise concerns. Classic Summers behavior. Or consider what happened to the Knowles report on Allston, which was highly critical. Summers had it suppressed. It was kept under lock and key at University Hall and no one was allowed to read it. As a result, a serious faculty report that raised numerous concerns disappeared without a trace (although I still have a copy if anyone wants it). In short, 9:25, people did repeatedly raise concerns. They were silenced by Summers.
12/12/2023 9:43 am
It is worth noting that the real visionary who made it possible for Harvard someday to have an Allston campus was Rudenstine. He bought the land (OK, some people don’t like the way he did it, but that is a separate issue). Summers walked in and started to do it, far too grandly (remember the plan to reroute the Charles River) and hastily. He had Silicon Valley in mind, but it’s a poor analogy in all kinds of ways. There will be a Harvard development in Allston eventually, but it’s now going to take awhile.
12/12/2023 9:44 am
Anon 9:37, I would love to get a copy of that report.
12/12/2023 10:02 am
Congratulations to Fred Abernathy and Harry Lewis for a superb op-ed article in today’s Boston Globe. I hope that Harvard Magazine will publish a similar piece, because alumni generally need to know what Fred and Harry are telling us.
It’s unfortunate that this Globe piece gives the anti-Harvard crowd another opportunity to display their hatred of Harvard, learning, wealth, and privilege, all bundled together.
Anon 9:37 - Would you post the Knowles report (or a link) here?
12/12/2023 11:32 am
I dunno, 8:27. Between the Pike and Harvard’s property it doesn’t seem to me that there’s enough of a surrounding community to make it even like Porter Square, which (last time I checked) has a vibrancy of sorts largely unconnected to Harvard students, so could be such a model.
As I said, the whole post-Knowles concept seemed to be based on guessing at the behavior of 19 yr. olds, and DEFINITELY had to depend on undergrads moving in, partly because it had to be sold to the residents as a concept that would appeal. Center of gravity to be in the Charles River, and all of that.
Sorry, Harry, N. Harvard St. (which I knew), and great op-ed!