FAS Could Take Over Hotel At Any Time

A week after Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) Jeremy R. Knowles announced that the Inn at Harvard building would revert to FAS control in 13 years, another University administrator has said that FAS has the legal right to take over the building at any point.

According to Director of University and Commercial Real Estate Scott Levitan, FAS may assume control over the building even before 2013, the year when debt on the building is expected to be fully repaid

"There was always an understanding that FAS could take the building at any time and convert it to academic use," Levitan said.

Knowles' announcement, according to Levitan, was a reasonable estimate for the time when most of the original $12 million debt would be paid off on the hotel, which was built in 1991 and is owned by FAS.

Despite the revelation, Levitan said there have been no plans as of yet for FAS to assume control of the building earlier than originally planned.

"There is no specific date when that would occur," he said. "It could occur at the discretion of the Faculty, whenever they wanted it to happen."

If the Faculty decided to do that before hotel profits pay off the debt, FAS would need to retire the debt up front.

Harvard's central administration and Harvard Planning and Real Estate built and continue to manage the property, located on a piece of land across the street from Barker Center and between Mass. Ave. and Harvard St.

Profits from the hotel currently go to two distinct purposes. Half of the money the hotel earns goes toward repaying the debt incurred by the construction of the building. The rest goes to FAS, where it is put in an endowment for Faculty recruitment, according to Associate Dean for Finance in FAS Ann E. Berman.

Berman said that FAS has always assumed that the Inn would have to operate as hotel until its debt was repaid in full.

But even if FAS had known that it could use the building earlier, she said it is unclear whether or not it would opt to do so, in part because it would still need to pay off the remaining debt.

For the moment, FAS officials maintain that the Faculty will assume control of the building in 13 years as planned.

Knowles said plans for the building, however, are still in their most rudimentary phase.

"I have always taken the view that the Inn at Harvard might be used for humanities departments and programs, considering its proximity to the Barker Center, and to Widener," Knowles wrote in an e-mail message.

The Faculty is currently shopping for available space close to the Yard. As part of the terms of October's merger between Harvard and Radcliffe, FAS must be willing to leave its Byerly Hall admissions office and undergraduate theater space in Agassiz House in the next decade if the Radcliffe Institute chooses to utilize those spaces.

Other upcoming renovations to the campus, according to Knowles, include renovations to University Hall, a new Life Sciences Building, an addition to the Science Center and the long-term analysis of the area east of Oxford Street and south of Hammond Street, for new science facilities.