Blowing It

THE ANNOUNCEMENT by the Kennedy Library Corp. this week that it will probably build the JFK archives and museum at the University of Massachusetts represents a collosal failure of the Bok administration's policy toward the project. As a result, Harvard has lost what could have been an exciting educational addition, the JFK archives, and is left with elaborate plans--but no site--for a $10 million political science complex.

The predicament that the University now faces is the result of the timidity of its policies towards the library. Faculty members and community residents have for a long time opposed construction of the Kennedy museum in Cambridge but endorsed the location of the archives here. President Bok, however, steadfastly refused to criticize (or for that matter say anything about) the desirability of the tourist-drawing museum, preferring instead to defer all criticism to the Kennedy Library Corp. If Bok had led a "surgical air strike" on the museum several years ago, before construction costs made splitting the museum from the archives financially impractical, he might have succeeded. By taking a stand, he could have fused the university's interests (the archives) with the community's interests (elimination of the museum). His silence helped bring about a solution no one really wanted.

Even in the last few weeks before the announcement, Bok and his administrators counted on a plan that everybody connected with the museum viewed unfavorably: placing the archives in Cambridge and taking over a portion of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., for a memorial museum. This plan never had a chance. Administrators at both the Kennedy Center and the library opposed it. To save the archives, the University would have had to come up with its own plan, possibly favoring a nearby Watertown site for the entire complex, or offering to subsidize construction of the archives here. But it instead rejected taking a dynamic role in the decision process and relied on the vain hope that Kennedy allegiances to Harvard would overcome the infeasibility of the plan they backed.

If University officials can gather their wits about them, however, they may still be able to turn the impending Kennedy Library decision to their favor by negotiating with state and federal officials to buy the entire 12.2-acre site.

Such a move would at first provoke the strongest kind of local opposition. But if Harvard were to sit down with the diverse neighborhoods it might then work out a plan allowing the site to be developed with both Harvard's and the community's interests in mind. If Harvard must increase its housing and teaching facilities in the next few years, then this vacant land across from Eliot House represents a far more desirable alternative to its present plans for destroying private homes, paving over Agassiz school yards and tearing apart neighborhoods. The plan to buy the whole site, though, would require cooperation with the community and initiative on the part of the University two qualities that Harvard has consistently tacked throughout the Kennedy's Library controvers.