University and the City Are Discovering How to Live In Peace--Most of the Time

Kerry's Corner used to stretch for good distance along the Cambridge side of the Charles. With its multi-family homes, the neighborhood was the natural nucleus for a strong political organization. In those early decided of the century, Harvard had only scattered holdings in the thick think of real estate between chutes Ave. and Memorial Drive. There was some mingling of the two cultures, the ethic lower-class of Kerry's Corner and the richer students of the University. But Kerry's Corner was a product of an earlier and it disappeared, taking with much of the flavor of turn-of-the-century politics. Harvard slowly expended its territory, creating the houses on the strip between the Charles and the Yard. Kerry's Corner contracted.

Today there remains only a small reminder of Kerry's Corner. The Charles, for about a quarter of a mile, dominated by Harvard. The Married Student Dormitories, rising high above the small wooden homes that the behind them, begin the University's riverfront real estate. Eliot house marks the end. The character of the area has changed almost completely. The Houses and the Married student Dormitories teem with life, a few of their in-habitants vote, and broadly any really belong to Cambridge. To most, the city is a home for a few years and no more.

Even many of the small homes along Putnam Ave., where the people of Kerry's Corner lived, have been abandoned by their original tenants; students, some from Harvard, some from M.I.T., and some from other colleges throughout the Boston area, live there now. And Harvard has bought many of the homes in the area, and the reach of the University's real estate office grows longer each day.

Voting Decline

The change appears in different ways to different people. It is visible: large numbers of students are constantly walking up and down Putnam Ave. It is financial: the rents in the area are gradually rising as the housing market grows tighter. And it is political: the vote stock of the area's local politician, Walter J. Sullivan, is diminishing steadily. Eight years ago, when Sullivan first ran for the City Council, he received more than 550 votes from his home precinct. His total has now declined to under 350. Sullivan is not lazy, and it is not inattention that accounts for the difference. As one colleague notes, "he's better organized, but the votes have simply moved away."

Nor is Kerry's Corner an isolated reflection of events of the past several decades. Walk away from Harvard Square in any direction and the parked cars tell the story. They are from Connecticut, Wisconsin, New York, and West Virginia. The Massachusetts plates are there, but not until the Square is a good fifteen or twenty minutes away do they really push aside their out-of-state competitors.

The real estate that is constantly being snatched up by the University, and the students who are steadily enlarging their grip on the City's housing market constitute one of the most consistent tensions between Harvard and the rest of Cambridge. "The biggest criticism that I've heard of the town-grown scene is that the University people have boosted rents so high that local people can't stay anymore," says one local politician.

The conflict is inevitable and it will persist. But it is a complicated struggle. The rising rents mean displacement for some Cambridge residents, but larger incomes for others. And if the high-bidding Harvard real estate agents insure that the University will expand its perimeter, they also assure many Cambridge residents of receiving twice or three times the ordinary value of their land. Perhaps because of these compensations, the real estate issue has been a largely silent one.

But there are other reasons for the silence. Over the past three decades, relations between the University and the City have grown slowly better. "The real friction used to be back in the '20's and '30's when you always had a rising tax rate," recalls one city official. "The politicians would always blame the rise on the tax-exempt properties of the University. In those days, the Universities were the politicians' kicking boards."

Hostility

The hostility has not evaporated, but it has softened. Events of the past several years indicate how great the change has been. Phillips Brooks House has drastically expanded its programs in Cambridge. Its largest program is now in a housing project in East Cambridge. The Graduate School of Education has gained the cooperation of the Cambridge School system in a number of experimental programs that it is testing in Boston metropolitan schools. The Harvard Medical School has become affiliated with the new Cambridge City Hospital. And finally, the local Cambridge "War on Poverty" has sought and used Harvard-Radcliffe volunteers.

These have caused their own problems: the PBH volunteers are constantly worried about both the people in the projects and the local politicians; the Ed School fears a possible flare-up in the old style and constantly attempts to avoid arousing political memories; and some observers expect conflict between Harvard doctors and the Cambridge-rooted doctors in the City hospital. It is possible, though hardly likely, that these tensions will doom the projects that created them. The conflicts seem to be tolerated. The Phillips Brooks House program in the Roosevelt Tower Housing project, for example, has received little but praise from City officials.

The growth of contact between the City and the University has had curious effects. The hostility has not disappeared, and it would be a mistake to assume that it is rapidly on its way out. James M. McGovern '64, a Cambridge native who ran unsuccessfully for the City Council last fall, speaks of the hostility that will probably linger on indefinitely.

"No Awareness"

Before he came to the College, McGovern had "no real awareness of what was going on in Harvard Square." Harvard bore the brunt of his jokes. Walking past a Harvard soccer field one afternoon with a group of friends, he heard one player call to another, "Gorgeous run, George." He recalls: "After that, whenever we talked about Harvard it was 'Gorgeous run, George,' and this was a sign for hilarious laughter." McGovern has not been away from high school long enough for his story to be unrepresentative.

Nor, understandably, have political outbursts against Harvard disappeared. "Let's get something sraight," city councillor Alfred E. Vellucci once said, "when Harvard's for something, I'm against it." Vellucci has often taken the initiative, proposing that part of Harvard Yard be turned into a parking lot, that the Lampoon be converted into a public lavatory, and that Plympton St. be renamed Cliffie Lane. His suggestions often achieve their only purpose, publicity. But even this reflects the "political capital" that can be made on the names of Harvard and M.I.T.

But the frequency and ferocity of the attacks have declined. Observes one local politician: "At certain rallies, in the heat of local campaigns there are likely to be anti-Harvard groups, they [the political candidates] may make anti-Harvard speeches. But it has to be very limited, and, in my opinion, subterranean. People don't make public blasts that they might make to small groups or a neighborhood gathering."

What has, in fact, evolved from the mixing of the traditional hostility and the more recent growth of contact has been a distinct ambivalence in City-University relationships. Where contact has been made on an individual basis, the hostility has often been put aside. Thus, PBH has been able to make long lists of friends. But where Harvard has emerged as an "Institution," the hostility--or at least much of it--remains. Watching a protest march down Massachusetts Ave. this spring most Cambridge spectators could murmur nothing but disgust. They identified the marchers with Harvard, and clearly they didn't like what was coming from the Square. It is also Harvard, the "institution," that can be bandied around in informal political discussions, and therefore it is in this context that anti-Harvard statements can be most effective.

Greater Interest

Part of the improvement in University-City relations can be attributed to a greater interest by many members of the Harvard community in what's going on in Cambridge. Yet, it would be easy to overestimate this interest (for most Harvard students, one suspects, "Central" is little more than a subway stop on the way to Boston), and it would be easy to ex-exaggerate its importance. Other forces also lie behind the change.

First, over the past three decades, the University has grown enormously. And as it has grown, it has become a larger and larger part of the City's life. Taken together with M.I.T., it has an extensive impact on the City's economy. It employs more people directly; and the people who live and work in the University support even a wider range of business activities. These people, says one politician, are basically loyal to the University. "As what we call the 'University-family' has grown, town-gown relations have correspondingly improved," he explains.

Second, the University has become more accessible since education in general is no longer considered the exclusive privilege of society's upper clause. "Many of the kids going to college now are struggling for an education...Back in the '30's, they were all millionaires," says another City official. Even those who criticize Harvard most would usually jump at the chance to send their children to the College.

And third, the current political style does not encourage anti-University harangues for their own sake. John F. Kennedy is cited as one man who bridged the University-City gap and made it less respectable to criticize one at the expense of the other. "As the educational institutions have grown," observes one long-time official, "politicians have read the hand-writing on the wall: they know that the institutions are becoming generally more influential."

But if these are plausible reasons for the easing of City-University relations, they do not reveal the dimensions of the University's own effort to make things better. In the last decade, Harvard has sought, and to a large extent, achieved a rapprochement with many of the City's politicians.

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There is no "political boss" in Cambridge, and the City's politics resembles a sputtering engine more than a smooth-operating machine. Each politician creates his own core of supporters, and each takes care of his own obligations. As a result, Cambridge politics is personalized politics, which exists on man-to-man contact and the trading of favors.

During the past decade, Harvard has cautiously ventured into the world of City government. It has done so largely through one man, Charles P. Whitlock. As assistant to the President for civic affairs, Whitlock has been Harvard's link to the City's patch-work politics. He attends meetings of the City Council and of many civic and neighborhood organizations. On almost all matters that involve Harvard and the City, he represents the University. But, more importantly, he has carefully cultivated the friendships of political and civic leaders.

When something bothers these men or they need something from Harvard, they go to Whitlock. Last winter, the daughter of one Cambridge City Councillor decided to study in Widener Library; she was asked to leave by library officials because she did not attend the University. In ten minutes, her father was on the phone protesting to Whitlock. When a fire destroyed a Cambridge Church, the congregation wanted to see if one of its pictures would be worth restoring. Church leaders called Mayor Daniel J. Hayes; Hayes called Whitlock, and Whitlock called Seymour Slive, professor of Fine Arts, to ask him to study the painting.

Job Requests

Whitlock receives job requests and pleas for help in getting Cambridge youths into the College or graduate schools. In many of these instances, he acts just like many other people in and out of Cambridge politics: he provides information and directs his friends to the proper place in the Harvard bureaucracy.

"Whitlock has opened up lines of communication that never existed before," one City politician explains. The improved communications has combined with the University's larger size to yield some distinct benefits for both Harvard and the City's politicians. Explains one old-hand: "Politicians who used to be critical of Harvard and M.I.T. now spend a lot of their time perfecting their relations with the universities personnel directors to get jobs for their constituents." The dividends to Harvard are even greater.

For one, the Harvard Administration feels more secure with the information Whitlock gathers and the friends he has made. In Whitlock they feel they have someone who can mollify the politicians and help smooth over differences; moreover--and just as important--they feel they have an "expert," someone who can offer them more than guess-work about different events in the City.

The existence of Whitlock's job at all says a lot about how the University Administration looks at the City. First, it is a clear indication that in the mid-fifties, when Whitlock took over, there was dissatisfaction with town-gown relations and a desire to pay more attention to the City. That desire still exists and so does the motivation that prompted it.

Harvard officials are not enamoured of Cambridge, nor are they pleased by the daily course of local politics. Most members of the Administration tend to regard the City's politicians as inconveniences--illogical, disorganized obstacles who are to be feared as much for their irrationality as for their deliberate calculations. They see Cambridge as a community without coherence or distinguishing characteristics. They wish there were a greater degree of homogeneity among different elements. Instead, they accept the inevitability of periodic conflict, and see the University, associated as it is with the upper class crust of the City, as a major component of the bipolar alignment that has traditionally characterized Cambridge: "the Brattle Street crowd" versus everybody else.

The roots of the hostility, Harvard officials think, lie in the coincidence of many different, but related conflicts: Yankee-Irish, rich-poor, and educated-uneducated. But Harvard's dislike for this state of affairs has not warped its good sense: the University must survive in this place, and thus the need for someone like Whitlock.

The formula seems to have had its successes. On specific items that it has sought from the City (for example, the closing of two streets, one to allow for the construction of a $2.8 million car underpass and the other to facilitate the constructions of Peabody Terrace), Harvard has been consistently successful. Some times the University has encountered some vocal opposition and delay but when the roll call has come the votes have always been there. This was not always the case. "Back in the thirties," recalls one politician "the University just didn't have the votes."

Police Relations

In other areas, Harvard has also made improvements. For example Dean Robert B. Watson has established a good working relationship with the Cambridge police. As the partial result, the police are consistently excellent in handling student disturbances, which range from springtime "riots" to anti-war protests. In addition, there seems to be a silent concord between Harvard and the police to let the University handle its own disciplinary problems.

Harvard's good fortune, to be sure, is not all a tribute to the present policies. Specific events in the2