Falling Behind in the Space Race

A pair of pool tables, two dozen computers, a free jukebox, a “lite-brite” LED announcement board, a smattering of culinary offerings from burgers to bubble tea, a TV labeled for “ad hoc” use and a math help station bombard the student who descends the granite steps to the basement of Harvard’s cathedral-like Memorial Hall.

This motley assortment of social and academic diversions—the product of $25 million and a decade of continuous renovations—is as close as it gets to a student center at Harvard.

The facility, known as Loker Commons, was Harvard’s attempted solution to a crisis created in 1994 when it decided to centralize its scattered humanities departments.

Despite undergraduate protests, the Freshman Union—previously the largest student social space on campus and home to a dining hall, a black box theater, a large event room, several smaller meeting rooms and music practice spaces—was razed to make way for the Barker Center for the Humanities.

Undergraduate Council President Rohit Chopra ’04 calls Loker—a space that had formerly housed a “Psycho Acoustic Laboratory” which conducted secret military research, the labs of behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner and assorted student offices—an ultimate failure on the part of the administration, an attempt to do too much in too small a space.

“It can’t be everything, so it’s nothing,” Chopra says. “What is this thing?”

College administrators have tried for years to respond to students clamoring for more space with creative—though sometimes clumsy—solutions, from building Loker to allowing a professional theater troupe to colonize one of the best stages on campus.

Despite these efforts, students complain that the already inadequate amount of social and extracurricular space on campus is steadily shrinking.

In part, this problem stems from the College’s position as one of many Harvard constituencies wrangling for the limited space available in Cambridge’s urban environment.

“A lot of the problems, it’s not even clear that money can solve them,” says Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis ’68.

When pitted against pedagogical, administrative and research needs, undergraduates often lose out. The past quarter century has seen building after building taken away from student activities and converted into research and academic facilities.

And even the limited space dedicated to student use is inefficiently managed.

While some say small steps—like allocating space more efficiently and centralizing scheduling—could alleviate the problem on a short-term basis, a long-term solution for the “space crunch” will likely require a more comprehensive review of available facilities and drastic reconfigurations of existing buildings.

With one or more faculties almost certain to move to the University’s new campus in Allston, significant space will become available on this side of the river.

But if the historic trend of prioritizing research needs continues, undergraduates may not reap the benefits of this exodus.

As varsity athletes compete with recreational needs in limited, dilapidated buildings and undergraduate dancers face the prospect of having no place to waltz when they lose their main dance space in two years, some say Harvard risks alienating prospective applicants unless it provides adequate space for student activities.

Lewis, who has fought an uphill battle for increased undergraduate space during his eight-year tenure, says nothing less than Harvard’s reputation is at stake.

“The deficits [in space] become even more compelling when viewed in the context of what our competitors are doing,” he wrote in a February memo to the University’s top planner Kathy Spiegelman, referring to recently-built student centers at Columbia and Princeton. “Harvard’s standing as the premier college in America, on which so much of the University’s reputation rests, should not be taken for granted as invulnerable if the problems discussed here are not addressed by University planners.”

The Space Age

The space crunch began as early as the 1970s when Harvard became responsible for most aspects of Radcliffe undergraduates’ lives, a change that swelled the College’s ranks by 10 percent, Lewis argued in the memo to Spiegelman.

The memo traces a pattern of drastic conversion of square footage allotted to students into faculty office and research space despite skyrocketing extracurricular participation.

“The priority placed on faculty needs over student needs is completely understandable,” he writes, “but the current zero-sum game cannot, I think, be played indefinitely to the College’s detriment.”

The broad shift from extracurricular to academic space is continuing. Plans for two new science buildings in the North Yard recently received approval, and the Science Center is currently undergoing an expensive multi-year renovation.

The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study’s reclamation of the buildings in Radcliffe Yard—all of which were at one point facilities dedicated to undergraduates—is one of the most pressing of such situations, Lewis says. Radcliffe has redefined its mission and will now focus on advanced graduate studies and research.

This fall, the Institute decided not to renew FAS’s lease on the Rieman Center for the Performing Arts, the primary space Harvard’s dancers use for classes, rehearsals and performances. The move could leave student dancers without a home come June 2005 if administrators can’t find a replacement.

The space has been used by dancers for over a century and underwent substantial and expensive upgrades just a few years ago.

Though administrators say they are hopeful that a space will be found—and University President Lawrence H. Summers has promised to secure a replacement by the deadline—an adequate dance facility needs a large stage, a high ceiling and expensive flooring, meaning that a replacement will require a large commitment of time and money to create.

Dancers have organized letter-writing campaigns, met with administrators and tried to attract attention to their cause.

Office for the Arts (OFA) Dance Program Director Elizabeth W. Bergmann says the situation demonstrates how easily undergraduate needs can be forgotten in high-level negotiations, such as the 1999 merger talks between Radcliffe and Harvard.

“In the merger, whoever gave away the dance space…made the problem,” she says. “Some group of people let this slip through…The powers that be now will have to pay for that mistake.”

Lewis says that this is a common problem in divying up limited space resources.

“Why don’t the people who are making the decisions contemplate the consequences?” he says. “The real question is why wasn’t it considered at the time the President and Fellows ceded the Rieman Center to the Radcliffe Institute.”

Dancers are not the only undergraduate constituency to lose out in the College’s jockeying with other schools for Harvard’s limited space.

Come 5:30 p.m. every evening, 47 out of the 67 Yard classrooms are turned over for use to the Division of Continuing Education.

Though Lewis says the decision to open Yard classroom space to the extension school fosters good community relations and earns FAS much needed money, it keeps students from using classrooms that would otherwise be available for extracurricular meetings and events.

Student actors, dancers, athletes, politicos and other group leaders have long griped that they don’t have the space they need, though most manage to make do with the basement corners they’ve been allowed to nest in.

“The space we have is small—it is really difficult for us to use it as is, but we have an office, which we are grateful to have,” writes Priscilla J. Orta ’05, president of the Latino cultural group RAZA. “At least it is someplace to keep our records and materials. If there were more of it though, it would be great... [to] hold meetings and the like in there or use it as a place where members could commune.”

Managing the Crunch

Amidst the river Houses lies a five-story “athletic center,” but the building’s competing responsibilities pit varsity and recreational athletes against each other.

Built in 1930 as the “Indoor Athletic Building,” the Malkin Athletic Center (MAC) was designed in a time when working out was not as central a part of undergraduates’ daily lives.

Even in the late-1980s, the exercise space was considered more a good spot to socialize, hang out and meet potential mates, with staff members estimating a daily sign-in of only about 200-300 users per day.

Today, however, the MAC sees roughly 7,000-10,000 visits a week—as many as 1,500 per day.

And the space is considered by undergraduates to be woefully inadequate.

This semester, the Undergraduate Council allocated nearly $13,000 for the renovation and expansion of House weight rooms in “a good first step to alleviate pressure” at the MAC, according to Chopra.

Adams House Master Sean Palfrey says his House needs more money from the administration for its weight room, as well as other House spaces.

“[We’re] encouraging [the] Administration to give us resources to maintain space,” he says.

But funding House gyms is only a short term solution, Chopra says, and there is still no long-term plan. Crowding has persisted at the MAC—to the point Chopra calls unsafe and “unacceptable”—and House gyms will never be able to offer a swimming pool or fitness classes as the larger facility does.

During the 2000-2001 academic year, then-Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles commissioned a space planning firm to draft renovation plans to increase the amount of recreational space available in the building.

After several delays, that report has finally been completed; though its suggestions have not yet been made public, Lewis wrote in his memo to Spiegelman that the firm found that Harvard meets only 25 percent of the exercise needs of its students.

But regardless of strategy, opening up space in the MAC will require the varsity wrestling, fencing, water polo and volleyball teams to move across the river to join the other varsity sports. Such an option would entail significant alteration to the current athletic facilities already there.

Though student athletes on these teams say they would not relish the longer walks to and from practice, many say they understand why the move would be necessary.

“The MAC is a great home court to play on, but the fact that floor time must be set aside for varsity teams, intramurals and recreational activities creates a scheduling nightmare for [Associate Director of Athletics] John Wentzell and many unhappy patrons,” says outgoing Men’s Volleyball Tri-Captain Mike Bookman ’03. “I hope for the sake of both varsity athletes and recreational patrons of the MAC that the athletes can be moved across the river.”

The MAC can be seen as an example of how even those facilities that are devoted to student activities often fail to fully meet student needs.

Just as varsity athletes are pitted against fitness junkies, a similar situation at Harvard’s premier theater space pits student thespians against professional actors.

Theater space is at a premium on campus. With only two major performance venues—two stages at the Loeb Drama Center and one at the Agassiz Theater—students are forced to scrounge for rehearsal and performance space in House common rooms, libraries, and converted pools and boiler rooms.

Undergraduate performers weren’t helped when in 1980 then-University President Derek C. Bok added another competitor for stage and rehearsal time to the mix.

Hoping that a professional resident company would provide mentorship and guidance to budding student actors and directors, Bok invited the American Repertory Theater (ART) to make the Loeb its home base.

College administrators say the ART has largely failed to live up to that role, though ART Executive Director Robert Orchard says such complaints are “disingenuous” because of the structure Harvard imposes on his company. Both sides agree that the relationship between the professional theater company and the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club (HRDC) is complicated by the arrangement.

Lewis estimates that the addition of the ART to the Loeb Drama Center has caused a net loss to undergraduates of 80-90 percent of the original building footprint.

The HRDC performs on the Mainstage for six weeks a semester. Some students—including dancers who unsucessfully mobilized a few years ago to ask for another week reserved for dance each year—say this is hardly enough. But for the ART, which pays its staff year-round, these twelve weeks mark a loss in ticket revenue and a “fundamental inefficiency” that he estimates at $1.5 million yearly, according to Orchard.

According to Orchard, the only way his company can provide more time on the mainstage for undergraduates is to find a secondary performance space, which he says he is actively seeking.

But Harvard has been less than helpful in this search, Orchard says.

The ART tried to purchase a large warehouse space in Watertown, but despite being a Harvard-affiliated institution, could not afford to buy the space from the University.

“Harvard Real Estate is operating the Watertown complex, and that makes it too expensive for us,” he says. “Harvard has never solved any of the ART’s space problems.”

Short-term Solutions

Although there is agreement about the fundamental need to build more physical space for students on campus, given the slow rate at which the cogs of the University planning process turn, administrators may need to find some short-term remedies.

Some say the most practical immediate relief could come from correcting inefficiencies in scheduling.

“We could use space more efficiently,” says OFA director Jack C. Megan. “The arts spaces that are actively managed...are used very efficiently and quite fully, but Harvard is very decentralized.”

For Megan, two efforts may help ease—but not solve—the space crunch: maximizing use of and centralizing information about existing spaces.

But this will require “a significant investment in framework,” including expensive staff additions and technology.

Chopra recommends the creation of a website—listing times and locations for available space—to aide student groups looking for meeting times, particularly in the evenings, when they are forced to compete with DCE classes. And he says that small changes—like shifting Loker from a hourly-based schedule system to a quarter-hourly system—would realize gains.

Though Lewis says centralizing scheduling might result in better allocation of spaces, he fears that removing masters’ autonomy over their own spaces would endanger the House system.

“The most efficient allocation of spaces in the Houses would be from someone in University Hall centrally,” he says, but “it would be totally destructive of House life.”

Even if a central scheduling system cannot be implemented, Chopra says information on how to reach House masters with power to schedule individual spaces would be helpful.

“It’s not just whether space exists,” he says. “People need to know how to get to it.”

To Chopra, increasing 24-hour access to student spaces around campus—like dining halls and libraries—would ameliorate crowding.

“We need to extend hours on all of our space,” he says.

Thinking outside the box may be key to maximizing the few—and often unusual—spaces available in the Houses.

“Kirkland House is a small House with very little space, so we have to be creative,” says Kirkland House Master Tom Conley.

Conley created a weight room two years ago for Kirkland residents, and this year he and his wife are offering a basement study room for Zen meditation.

Looking to the Long-term

But creative conversions of small basement rooms and beefing up of House gyms can only help so much, students and administrators say. At some point, the University will have to undertake significant renovations and construction projects to meet the ever increasing demands for student space.

Harvard’s purchase of the Hasty Pudding building in 2000 holds promise for helping to reduce the strains on the theater community, says Associate Dean of the College David C. Illingworth ’71 and others. A proposal to renovate the building, which is in serious disrepair and has awaited renovation for several years, has already been approved by the Harvard Corporation.

But that project comes with a pricetag of $23 million, a host of logistical and community-relations difficulties and will likely provide only a small increase in usable space to the arts community.

The prize that many students have their eye on is a larger and better-planned student center than Loker Commons.

Chopra says the College does not do enough to provide informal social spaces, a need which he says the high attendance at Council-sponsored movie nights made evident. He and others have suggested that the solution to the space problem may lie in locations that had not previously been used for students at all.

Most undergraduates will never venture above the ground-level shops of the Holyoke Center, as the skyscraper has houses administrators in some of the University’s important but obscure offices, such as the trademark licensing division, student receivables and planning and real estate services.

But the 10-story building with a gorgeous view of Harvard Yard is one of the most prime locations in the Square, and some wonder why its status as an administrative building is such a given.

“I hope the Holyoke Center could have uses more directly related to students of all kinds, but undergraduates especially,” Illingworth says. “Does the payroll office need to be in Holyoke Center? Many employees, myself included, seem to get paid without ever having to go there.”

He adds that the building could house a number of seminar rooms and classrooms, or even an entire department.

But with FAS tightening its purse strings, these dreams may have to be saved for a sunnier financial climate.

Several new building projects are on hold, according to senior administrators.

“Once you’ve got an identifiable project, it can get on the list,” Lewis says. “Part of the problem is there’s just a lot of building going on.”

And as Harvard continues to snap up unclaimed space in Allston and Watertown and its various schools have already begun to jockey for position from crowded Cambridge, it remains to be seen whether the College will be able to move its priorities to the top of the University’s list.

College administrators, including Illingworth and Lewis, are adamant that undergraduate resources should not be pushed across the river and past the athletic fields. They cite safety concerns and logistical scheduling challenges.

“We’re all told we have to be flexible about using this new space,” Illingworth says. “Law school students have less of a need, I think, to be here in the Square than College students.”

While Illingworth and others acknowledge that Allston will likely include some component of College life, Illingworth says he would be adamantly against moving the athletic fields—which have existed since the Civil War—further into Allston.

“There’s something sacred about those fields,” he says. “To move those fields would be a real shame.”

Short of relocating FAS facilities to Allston, administrators emphasize that a substantial gain in undergraduate space might be realized if other faculties move across the river, as would occur under both of the two main scenarios being discussed for Allston.

For instance, if the Graduate School of Education moves—which its dean says its faculty would like to do—three buildings would open up in proximity to the Loeb Drama Center and Agassiz Theater. Illingworth says these buildings are obviously a prime space, where he could “envision a kind of arts community.”

And if the law school heads to Allston, its large campus adjacent to Harvard Yard would be vacated.

For College planners, this domino effect has the prospect of opening up large swaths of free space.

And College students desperately need something to make up for the severe deficit of space for them on campus, students and administrators agree.

With a president who has expressed his commitment to improving the undergraduate experience and an incoming dean of the College who has identified solving the space crunch as among his top priorities, some wonder if finally the administration will prioritize undergraduate space needs.

Others remain skeptical. Bergmann says she wonders whether the administration has much commitment to building arts facilities.

Chopra says the way the administration handles the space problem—what it chooses to place in Allston and to whom they grant space on this side of the river—will reveal broader intentions.

“Solutions…are going to be very indicative of the priorities of the president and the deans,” he says.

As Lewis has said, “Status at Harvard is measured by meters from the John Harvard statue.”

—Staff writer David B. Rochelson can be reached at rochels@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer J. Hale Russell can be reached at jrussell@fas.harvard.edu.