Published Monday, November 1, 2004 First to Represent Students on Allston  Dean Selects Higher Ed Doctoral Student for University Committee By Jennifer Tutak

The University's new Allston Master Planning Committee will include two graduate student representatives, including Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) first-year doctoral student Zach First.

“The Ed School is a wonderful place that I love, so to have the school in an official capacity offer me the opportunity to represent its students is an enormous honor,” First said.

First's appointment comes after months of wrangling between the Student Government Association (SGA) and administrators over the lack of student representation on a committee making decisions about HGSE's impending move across the Charles River. 

First will join 23 other students, faculty members and administrators on the committee, including a student from the School of Public Health and HGSE Academic Dean Kathy McCartney.  The Professional Schools Committee -- on which HGSE Dean Ellen Condliffe Lagemann sat -- has been disbanded.

Concentrating in Higher Education, First is attending HGSE for the second time.  A 1997 graduate of Haverford College, he worked at his alma mater for three additional years as the Student Activities Coordinator before undertaking the Higher Education Ed.M. at HGSE in 2000.  First then netted the position of Assistant Dean of Student Life at Olin College in Needham, a then-new institution dedicated to engineering sciences that offers full-tuition scholarship to all accepted students.

First said he went to Olin precisely because it was a start-up, and he could be involved with its formation. Beginning two weeks before his official graduation from HGSE, First estimates he was the 25th employee at Olin.  At that point, there were no students and no campus. 

“My office was a 6-by-6 foot landing at the top of a staircase in a converted house that I shared with a 6’5" physicist,” First recalled.  “People had offices in bathrooms, in the kitchens, stashed all over as the campus was being built.  Everyone trying to get the college up and running.”

This past June, he stepped down at Olin to begin the Ed.D. program in Higher Education.  First’s area of interest involves studying how structural factors influence how colleges and universities operate.

As First explained, “The way that an institution is organized…has to do with how the non-physical structure of the institution leads people. When you organize an institution around faculty, tenure, students of a certain age, a residential setting—that puts forces into play, shapes the institution, what the goals are.  It puts things into play that people aren’t always conscious of.”

With this mind-set, experience orchestrating nascent endeavors, and the fact that he will be present at HGSE for several years, First appeared a strong addition to the Allston Master Planning Committee, said Dean Lagemann in a message to students, faculty and staff.

"His background makes Zach the perfect candidate for this job," she wrote.

Last year's SGA had expressed a hope that they would have a hand in coordinating a student representative for an Allston committee. 

But unlike the two undergraduate representatives to the committee, who will be chosen in a process coordinated in part by their student council president, Director of the Higher Education Program Judy McLaughlin nominated First for membership on the committee, and the HGSE Dean’s Office interviewed him in early October for the position. 

First emphasized that he has no individual agenda on which to base his recommendations for the committee. 

“My main goal is to help do what I can to help the Education School translate both its current needs and aspirations into a physical program in Allston," he said.  "This involves helping the HGSE senior faculty and administrators, and students engaged in the process, figure out what the campus is going to look like in the next 25 years.  It has to be forward looking, it has to be flexible, and it has to be about more than who we are at this moment.”

He recognizes that the decisions made by his committee have long-term repercussions.

“You essentially have a city and university remaking themselves in a mammoth project," he said.  "Now we are at year-two, and people are very concerned—and I count myself in this group—that we do our best to maintain flexibility.  We have ideas at the present moment, but everyone acknowledges in the same breath, that these ideas may be very different 20 or 30 years from now.  It’s a tricky balancing act to act on current aspirations and leave room for future ones.”

First aims to be a conduit to garner graduate student input, and HGSE student input specifically, into the project. 

He views the role of the committee as that of an advisory board to work with Harvard President Lawrence Summers, the Provost, and other high-level administrators to provide recommendations.  The result of their work and monthly meetings will be a first iteration of what the Allston campus will need and look like. 

The University has also hired a master planning firm, Cooper Roberts, which will coordinate a mind-boggling array of details—questions about transportation, utility lines, and right of ways to name a few, in addition to plans like where building and parks will go. 

This preliminary planning stage, and First’s committee tenure, is expected to last until at least December 2005, though First hopes to be involved with the Allston development throughout his doctoral career.

First hopes to finish his Ed.D. in four years, and afterward, would like to remain dually engaged in classroom teaching and research, as well as the hands-on, material responsibility that comes with an administrative position.  In the meantime, he appreciates the broad-based focus at HGSE, particularly when considering the expansive career range of its alumni. “To me, that’s enormously important. It suggests a sort of a liberal arts model in a sense, and that HGSE is multi-disciplinary in approach.”

First is also a Red Sox fan, and he compared Harvard’s expansion to Allston in part to the recent World Series victors.

“This is in some ways a time of unprecedented excitement and opportunity for the university.  For all of us who are around right now, it’s a little bit like being lucky enough to be around when the Red Sox won the World Series," First said.  "We all happen to be lucky enough to be at Harvard during this historical process as it gets started.  It’s a privilege to witness it, and we also have an enormous responsibility to future generations who will be living with the consequences of our work for decades, if not centuries.  This work is going to be important, so we better make the right decisions.”

Jennifer Tutak is a contributing writer for The Appian.