"I would suggest to you that this is not at all a diverse group," DiGiovanni said.
In fact, a Boston Globe feature that ran in the fall suggested that the Defense Fund may have opposed the Dunkin' Donuts franchise on the basis of the proprietor's ethnicity. The article claims that the group has no Portuguese-American, African-American or Italian-American members.
Gifford says that charge was fabricated. She says the fund has studied the possibility of suing the Globe over the story.
DiGiovanni and other critics of the fund offer a different vision of how the Square should be shaped. The market should decide, they say.
"No matter what we do, it's the students and the people who decide who stays," DiGiovanni says.
Tod Beaty, president of the Harvard Square Business Association, agrees. He says the defense fund would be better served by attempting to work with developers and the business community. That approach has worked well for the business association, he says.
"It's not healthy for there to be a split in the community," Beaty says.
Kristin S. Demong, president of Harvard Real Estate, says she hopes the next decade will see an increase in cooperation between the Square's competing interests.
"The confrontational style of the 80s has not served us well," Demong said during a forum on the Square last month. "A cooperative process will help us produce better results."
Kramer agrees. "We need talking, not fighting," he says.
But Gifford vehemently disagrees. She says those who advocate cooperation ignore the greedy intentions of local developers. "That attitude is a very utopian and simplistic view of reality," Gifford says.
"There's nothing benign about capitalism," she says.