60 Boylston Street: Profile of a building

Early in the afternoon of any Saturday when the Harvard football team is playing a home game, a procession of Harvard administrators and secretaries begins to wind its way from 60 Boylston Street across the river to the stadium at Soldiers Field. The Athletic Department staff leaves its enclave by Kirkland House en masse, to watch these contests. These are the administrators who take care of all the bureaucratic details of running a full-scale athletic program, so in a sense the games are the culmination of all their efforts.

But within 60 Boylston street itself, the interaction between administrators and administered is missing the anonymity of a real bureaucracy. Many of the people who work there are former athletes themselves--just "a bunch of overgrown football players," as Omar Fleischaker '78, a manager of the football team, says. "You always sit down and talk about sports for ten minutes or so before you even think about getting down to business."

The nature of the administrative work itself doesn't really permit impersonality. The department caters to students and it would be impossible to reduce the players to the numbers and statistics of the Registrar's office. Francis Toland, the department's business manager, describes Boylston street as "a continual flow of bodies," students with questions and problems that have to be dealt with before the teams can begin to play.

As business manager. Toland finds many of those bodies coming to him, with "all the headaches, complaints, you name it." Since he must authorize every expenditure in the department. Toland is usually busy--but not too busy to stop and describe the final seconds of the '68 Harvard-Yale game, when Harvard "beat" Yale by tying the score in the last 40 seconds of the game. The pictures of former Harvard coaches and long-departed football teams bear witness to his interest, above all, in sports.

People like Toland increase your sense that the only difference between players and administrators at Boylston Street is a few years in between. Because students who go there regularly have to be part of the sports program, they have a lot more in common with staffers than one finds in most student-administration interaction. Most of the people who work on the second floor of the building reflect this easy-going attitude. In one office, several administrators toss a nurf ball around while they discuss health insurance policies, while a conversation about the IAB filters through opposite ends of the hallway.

The structure of the building doesn't really lend itself to any of the bureaucratic rigidity of a Holyoke Center or William James, anyway. Tucked away in a relatively untravelled corner of the University, the small, dark old fraternity house has open stairwells, crowded offices that open onto the halls, and connecting passageways between offices. It would be hard to stay aloof from the general traffic, even though the chaos does sometimes make it hard to get much work done, Toland says.

In comparison to Toland's second-floor beehive, the student manager's office in the basement of 60 Boylston street seems pretty deserted. Janet Mitchell, the managers' secretary, says she hasn't had much to do yet this year. But when the semester kicks off, every student who wants to play in any sport has to fill out an eligibility form--they must all be channelled through her--and then, she says, it can get really hectic. Football manager Fleischaker says he used to think most of the forms players have to fill out--relating to health, academic standing and general well-being--were just more red tape; but now, in his third year of Harvard managing, he says he thinks it's all basically necessary. Mitchell calls her job "cyclical": each year she has to go through the same details she went through the year before, each year getting used to new faces as well as welcoming back old friends.

Mitchell worked in several other University offices before she ended up at Boylston Street, and now she says she wouldn't work anywhere else. People there are friendly and relaxed, she says, and she has a chance to get to know students in ways she couldn't in most places. A lot of staffers seem to agree with her, and the turnover at the building is minimal. Four years ago, five women retired who between them had racked up a total of well over 100 years with the Athletic Department. And of the five people who replaced them, only one has left in the intervening four years.

Pat Walsh, who works on the second floor in the Sports News Office, says she thinks one of the reasons people stay with the department so long is a feeling that jobs there are secure. Although the budget is tight, she says, austerity has meant belt-tightening rather than layoffs. True, the building itself is old, and the heating system can make working there pretty uncomfortable--one side of the building is overheated while the other side is freezing. But Walsh says she has found the general friendliness at 60 Boylston more than makes up for a few physical inconveniences.

Despite its idiosyncracies, Bob Watson, director of Athletics, says he thinks the building at 60 Boylston Street is likely to house the department for some time to come. Athletics ought to keep a low profile, he says, taking a secondary position in a place geared primarily toward academics. A full-scale, luxurious office is out of the question, he says, unless the department's budget grows suddenly.

Right now that budget is the Boylston Street staff's major headache. Smaller than that of most Ivy League athletic departments, Watson's crew has to operate and maintain all Harvard's facilities on $3 million--the same amount it had to play with three years ago, despite inflation and the additional expense of increasing facilities for women. So it isn't surprising that Watson keeps returning to the word "Spartan" in his description of the department.

Watson's office is up on the third floor of the building, high over the Boylston Street traffic. Sixty Boylston is set up almost exactly like a bureaucratic flow chart, with decisionmakers--Watson and two assistant directors of Athletics--at the top, intermediate staffers on the second floor, and student managers in the basement. Jean MacIver, Watson's administrative assistant, says it was organized that way on purpose when Watson moved in four years ago, so that top administrators wouldn't be constantly interrupted by students needing help with minor details. But no one is really removed from the day-to-day operations of the sports field in Boylston Street, and while the third floor is more sedate than the lower stories--no one is throwing nurf balls around up here-athletes and managers find their way to the top floor with the ease born of a fair amount of practice.

In fact, the only rooms that don't attract the traffic that moves steadily up and down the narrow staircases are those just inside the entrance, the information and ticket sales desks. The line for participation tickets--sold to graduate students and faculty members who want to use the facilities maintained by the College--is already six or seven people long, and the information desk is besieged with questions about available squash courts and swimming pools. These students are not Boylston Street regulars, on the whole; no one who is really interested in Harvard athletics is likely to stop in often to ask directions to Soldiers Field. But this floor is as far into 60 Boylston as most students will ever get, and the glassed-in ticket counter will be all they see of the Athletic Department's administration.

Maybe it's a good thing that most people stop there, because the building probably couldn't accommodate any more people than haunt it already. And since the new sports complex doesn't include plans for any more office space, 60 Boylston Street is likely to remain the small, out of the way haven for the Athletics Department it is now for some time to come.