“[These improvements] don’t necessarily get you from the John Harvard statue to Allston in six minutes,” says Spiegelman. “But they begin to make people feel like the campus is a place you want to walk to.”

While the fantasies of professors and planners have fueled much discussion in recent committee meetings, concrete plans and pragmatic approaches have so far proved elusive.

In a Cambridge where Harvard fought a year, and lost, its struggle for permission to dig a tunnel under a single city street, a subway line, monorail, or moving sidewalk might not be an easy sell.

And the actual cost of a dreamline to Allston—adding to the untold billions that will build a campus from scratch—might give pause to any planner or president.

“We weren’t ask to think through these ideas—just to think of them,” Jacobsen says. “I have no sense of how any of these options will work logistically.”

But for now, anything is possible.

—Staff writer Alex L. Pasternack can be reached at apastern@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Lauren A.E. Schuker can be reached at schuker@fas.harvard.edu.