And there is much more going on outside the gates of the Yard that most students will never know about. Sequestered in an office in downtown Boston sit Harvard's treasurers, the men who handle the University's $1.4 billion dollar endowment--the largest in the country--and have decided to concentrate investments in oil, defense and the like. Things are better now; they weren't even watched back in 1972, when a group of angry students stormed Massachusetts Hall to protest the University's holdings in Gulf Oil which was operating in Angola, where racial tensions were running high.
The Corporation--that group of seven all-white, all-male people that run the University, decide what's going to be built where and who will build it and why--has a committee that advises it on investments now. It's called the Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility and the key word there is not responsibility but advisory. Because as the ACSR, which includes students among its members, has turned increasingly liberal, the Corporation has shied away from those suggestions and remained conservative. Not much has really changed from four years ago, when a spring night brought 3500 undergraduates into the streets of Cambridge with candles and placards and shouts that Harvard should sell its holdings in companies in South Africa. The Corporation initiated what it called a case-by-case review back then, a review that is still going on, a review where the endless details have overshadowed principles and the students' demands have gone unanswered.
And if South Africa seems a little far away for your tastes--if you can't identify with the hundreds of black miners who died under the whips of a company run by a man who mined diamonds and ten built the library in the basement of the Kennedy School--you might want to take a walk down the block. Any block in the surrounding area will do, because Harvard is sure to own the land and most of the buildings on it. And Harvard is buying more each day and the city's leaders are still wringing their hands in distress but remain unable to do too much about it.
Keeping those buildings up is what the University calls a "support service," something that keeps the academic wheels turning. And so the University of committees and task forces decided it needed a company to do the dirty work--it's called Harvard Real Estate--and it works out of the top floors of Holyoke Center. And the windows in Holyoke Center don't open so the air-conditioning bills keep going up and when angry citizens gather outside the Yard to protest Harvard's land grabbing, the bureaucrats upstairs can't even hear what they're saying.
And you won't hear much about the thousands of people that Harvard has in its employ, because all of the unions settled for new contracts last year. One by one they lined up, and one by one the University voiced its offer and would give nothing more. In the Medical Area, of course, the union leaders couldn't line up because there is no union, because the last time they tried to establish one at the hospitals and in the laboratories, the University quelled the movement.
Down the street from those hospitals on Huntington Ave and behind the Med School, you'll find a huge building with a smokestack that rises so high in the sky they've put little red lights on it to warn the airplanes away. Below the smokestack is the massive shell of a building that is partially vacant inside. They call it the Medical Area Total Energy Plant--a fancy name for a concept so simple--and it was Harvard's answer to the energy crisis but now it's a crisis all its own.
It was supposed to cost $40 million and save a lot of money but by the time they finish it, it may cost $400 million (one-third of the University's endowment). It was supposed to give three kinds of energy to the hospitals and medical schools in the area and do so cheaply and efficiently. But Harvard's dream became a nightmare when the neighbors found out that the engines in that plant might spew gases that could hurt their pets and children. And the state said Harvard couldn't have its engines and the University called its battery of attorneys in to fix the mess but they couldn't. And instead of talking to the community leaders, Harvard brought in its scientific experts to prove that it wouldn't hurt the people and sent its other experts to Washington to lobby for a tax loophole so the University wouldn't lose its shirt on a big gray hole in the ground.
WHEN YOUR CAB turns the corner on Storrow Drive and you can see Back Bay and the Hancock tower, take a look to the right and father back and you'll probably see the power plant's tower. It really doesn't look like much from a distance but up close it looks big and solid, like it will stand there for another 345 years. And some day it may air condition the laboratory where the scientists fighting World War III will find the right nerve gas and people will look to Harvard for the answer. But for now, it looks pretty lonely.