Drew Faust Reconsiders Allston
Posted on December 12th, 2007 in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Linda Wertheimer, who is starting to break some real news in the Globe, reports that Drew Faust is reconsidering some of Larry Summers’ plans for the Allston campus.
The president of Harvard University, Drew Faust, showing restraint on a major expansion that her predecessor relentlessly promoted, plans to reexamine proposals to move two graduate schools and other operations from Cambridge to a new campus across the Charles River in Allston.
A $1 billion science complex, which will house a stem cell institute, will stay on track for a ground-breaking early next year. But everything else, including plans for building four undergraduate dorms in the Boston neighborhood, will be reviewed, Faust said in a phone interview Monday.
Well. This is interesting. Reconsidering Allston would appear to be Faust’s most independent action since taking over from Derek Bok/Larry Summers as president, and in Wertheimer’s article, Faust suggests that she thinks the process by which Summers conducted Allston planning was fundamentally flawed.
She said the university will take pains to consult more widely and deliberately with faculty and community members and, if necessary, revise the plan before giving the final version to the city next fall. Several professors have expressed concerns that the current Allston plan could dilute the cohesive quality of student and academic life on the Cambridge side of the river.
“For the last several years, the university leadership has been in transition,” Faust said. “I can own a project and look at it in a deliberative way. . . . We’re looking at everything again.”
A curious quote: First, Faust suggests that Harvard’s leadership has been in transition for several years, rather than just one or two (which is true, by the way, and good for her for saying so).
But more interesting is the almost plaintive assertion, “I can own a project…” Did anyone doubt that? And if so, was it the audience or the speaker?
Here is perhaps the most important point: Faust’s decision of what to move ahead with and what to put the brakes on may be exactly the wrong one. (And in framing the decision as a referendum on Larry Summers’ decision-making process, she deftly changes the subject from what decision she made to why she made it.)
James Watson, who has been discredited on other fronts in recent weeks, wrote about the Allston expansion in the pages of 02138 some months back. Watson’s argument: Building a massive science complex in Allston was the wrong way to go and could be a massive waste of money.
No one at Harvard, so far as I have seen, read, or heard, has rebutted that argument.
So while Wertheimer’s article shows a president taking command, the reverse may really be true; Drew Faust may, in face, be caving in to entrenched bureaucracies which don’t want to move to Allston, while plowing ahead with an expenditure of untold billions for a science effort whose merit has never been publicly debated……
One Response
12/12/2023 6:15 pm
Seems like Faust is making too much news this week. SLow it down!