Picking the Right Gift

SILVER MYLAR balloons that looked like enormous, limp Fenway Franks. Whale noises. Forty-two and one-half seconds of fireworks.

That was Harvard's big riverside gala Wednesday night on the Charles. Apart from its failure to entertain, the celebration was also the only planned opportunity for Cambridge to share in the bounty of the University's 350th birthday party. Outside of traffic jams, roped off parking places, and long lines at every store and restaurant in the Square, the big blowout down by the river was Harvard's big gift to the city.

Harvard got the Prince of Wales. Cambridge got four big balloons floating over the Charles.

While workmen were setting up the balloons Wednesday, Harvard did announce a much more significant contribution to Cambridge's public welfare. The James Bryant Conant Fellowships will give six Boston and Cambridge school teachers an opportunity to spend a year at the Graduate School of Education each year.

The $700,000 endowment is the first substantive, rather than stylish, contribution to Cambridge to come out of the Yard in some time. Year after year, Cantabs get lots of headaches from their most celebrated residents' antics--the Head of the Charles, the Yale Game, Commencement and the like--and very little relief from their enormous financial and intellectual resources.

The Conant Fellowships break pattern of Harvard gifts to the city. It is a significant and pragmatic contribution to the city's future welfare--and one that draws on the University's unique resources.

Harvard President James Bryant Conant '13 was a strong supporter of the public school system and during his tenure established the scholarship system that drew talented students from around the country to Cambridge. He recognized that Harvard must never lose sight of the entire continuum of the educational system, a sentiment that the new endowment captures.

But Harvard must recognize that its obligation to the City of Cambridge goes far beyond education. The University's activities as Cambridge's largest property holder, landlord and number-one corporate citizen profoundly effect the lives of many Cantibrigians.

Harvard could take an important step toward recognizing its larger responsiblity by helping to tackle on of the most serious dilemmas facing the city: housing and homelessness.

One block away from Leverett House stands a church-owned parking lot which the University plans to lease to build student dormitories. Adams House Co-Master Jana Kiely proposed that Harvard lease the land, satisfy its own housing needs, and then set aside a portion for homeless families and a center for socially concerned students.

The Kiely plan was rebuffed because Harvard wants the whole parcel for itself. Ironically, the St. Paul's parking lot stands in the midst of a neighborhood in which Harvard has destroyed more than 70 homes in the last 40 years to make room for dormitories.

The relationship between Harvard and Cambridge should not be a tale of two cities, a story of the haves and the have nots. The marriage between town and academic gown cannot last another 350 years if Cambridge's largest insitution stands in isolation from the rest of the city.