Published Tuesday, October 21, 2003
Updated Monday, October 27, 2003
HGSE Begins Formal Plans on Allston Campus
By Andrew Mandel
APPIAN STAFF WRITER

The Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) will be leaving Cambridge and moving across the Charles River to Allston, according to a series of “planning assumptions” unveiled this month by University President Lawrence Summers.

In a proposal that envisions a new academic village to rival Harvard Square, the University intends to build an entirely new campus for the HGSE and the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) on a plot of land adjacent to the Harvard Business School and larger than the University’s acreage in Cambridge.

“The kind of opportunity before us comes along rarely in the life of a modern university,” Summers wrote in an Oct. 21 letter to the community.

Press reports have predicted different scenarios for the property in recent months, including moving the Harvard Law School onto the space. Ultimately, the University decided to place two of its most “public-friendly” professional schools next to the working-class community of Allston-Brighton.

New undergraduate housing, a science hub and relocated museums may also become a part of the new campus.

In an interview last month, HGSE Dean Ellen Condliffe Lagemann said that, if the Ed School and the School of Public Health moved, they could partner to offer a “wide range of services” for the community, such as literacy and prevention work, becoming “a place where our faculty do clinical research and our students find rich internship opportunities.”

The timeline for the move has not yet been solidified, but Summers said the University may begin “limited building within the next few years.”

The President’s Office has kept plans for the move under wraps, and as recently as an interview in mid-October, Lagemann said she had not been told of any concrete decisions to relocate the school.

In a message to the HGSE community on the day of Summers’ announcement, Lagemann said a new campus in Allston will alleviate major space constraints on Appian Way.

“ The design of our campus inhibits interaction among students, faculty, and staff,” she wrote. “There is a lack of community space for the School to come together. Our classrooms are inadequate in number, size, and functionality. Additionally, the School leases nearly 40,000 square feet of space off-campus in the Harvard Square area, which is expensive and not necessarily designed for academic and research use.”

The school is in particular need of classrooms that accommodate 30 to 50 students, said John Collins, director of Gutman Library and chair of the HGSE Allston Planning Committee. “We end up having to cram large groups into classrooms, or putting them in a lecture hall that’s much too big,” he said.

Gutman Library, too, is “starting to get a little tired,” Collins said.

Though the 30-year-old building boasts a new rare book room and a learning technology center, “it’s hard to find a quiet corner,” he said. Students in the library are sharing lockers, and doctoral candidates are often quatrupled-up in offices.

“ In this library, books are written, ideas are digested and hatched,” Collins said. “In order to promote that stuff, you’ve got to have the right environment.”

In preparation for the move, Collins and his colleagues – including Professors Catherine Snow, Howard Gardner, and Robert Schwartz, as well as Office of Student Affairs Director Nancy Nienhuis and Gutman Conference Center Director Aaron Park -- have been gathering data since the spring about where students live, cross-register and perform their practicum work, as well as where faculty members conduct their research and maintain professional partnerships.

But Collins said existing relationships with Cambridge schools and colleagues would not necessarily disappear, even as Allston opens up new opportunities for collaboration.

“ We don’t just find ourselves working in any situations that come along,” Collins said. “We have longstanding collaborations for a reason.”

Collins’ committee has toured the Allston property in a bus, and they are in regular communication with an architect, who has been helping the committee think about “spatial relationships” – including how long it would take students to walk from one place to another on proposed blueprints, as well as options for parking, a problem that currently plagues the school.

The committee has imagined a number of potential uses for the new space, including a student center and a professional development center for visiting teachers. Collins will be heading up the effort to solicit community opinion on how the HGSE might use the space.

As for a lab school, like the one Columbia University is developing for both professors’ children and the youth of their community, “it depends on whether something like that will resonate with the faculty,” Collins said. “Nothing is off the table.”

The University has already begun considering questions of transportation, as well as restaurants, shops and other commercial businesses, which would “need to support the ambiance of an academic community,” Collins added.

It is unclear who would assume ownership and use of Gutman Library, Larsen and Longfellow Halls when HGSE relocates, though “my assumption is that Harvard would be reusing it,” Collins said. He did not know for certain whether HGSE owned these buildings and could benefit monetarily from renting out the space.

This may depend on who will be paying for the new campus, which would appear to be an impossibilty for HGSE, whose share of the University endowment dwarfs only those of the Graduate Schools of Design and Dentistry.

However, HGSE’s financial straits should not limit its vision for Allston, Collins said.

“We have not talked about cost once,” he said. “I don’t want us to be shortsighted or any less grand in our thinking than any other school at Harvard.”

Keep reading The Appian for more coverage of the move to Allston.

Andrew Mandel, a student in the Technology in Education program, is a member of the Appian Board of Editors.