“In my day they used to talk about the military-industrial complex,” she says. “I think what you now have to talk about is the whole patent-corporate culture.”

Recently she joined several other ANC members to form ACID—the Agassiz Committee on the Impacts of Development. The new group aims to counter Harvard’s ongoing efforts to clear space in Agassiz for more science offices.

“They’re going to have a huge mass of buildings,” she says. “They’re going to be very unattractive for everybody.”

In fact, Goldberg contends, Agassiz is the wrong place altogether for Harvard to put up its new science buildings.

Better, she suggests, would be to put the labs on Harvard’s extensive and undeveloped land holdings in Allston.

“If they wanted to build a science city, this is not the place for that,” she says.

In Mid-Cambridge, Quiet Determination

Sitting on a bench in front of Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, John R. Pitkin remembers a long career dealing with Harvard.

Pitkin is a quietly determined man, a leader for more than 25 years in the Mid-Cambridge Neighborhood association (MCNA). He helped found the MCNA and later became its president.

The city’s high school, where he sits as kids trickle out in the afternoon, has been the site of many MCNA meetings—including one this winter where all but a couple residents reaffirmed their opposition to a major new government center Harvard has in the works.

He represents a large and diverse neighborhood that sprawls from Inman Square to the edge of Harvard Square, full of houses and small apartment buildings.

Mid-Cambridge is the site of the longest and most divisive town-gown battle of recent years. The struggle over the government center made its way to the Cambridge City Council this month and shows no signs of letting up.

The neighborhood has kept up its battle for five years. Residents have gone to meeting after meeting, hoping—even if they can’t defeat the project—either to delay it as long as they can or make it as palatable as possible.

For Pitkin that has meant packing his schedule with meetings and publishing a newsletter for neighborhood residents.

Pitkin became so identified with the Harvard struggle that his campaign for city council last fall—a deliberately understated effort that began late—came within 59 votes of defeating an incumbent councillor.