“The costs and the effort weren’t the best course Harvard could have taken,” he says. “It probably shouldn’t have been undertaken.”

But Bain says MATEP’s costs seemed larger in the 1970s and haven’t adversely affected the University.

He says that in comparison to the endowment of only one or two billion dollars that the University boasted in the 1970s and early 1980s, $350 million “felt relatively large.”

“Harvard moves on and accumulates more money, and despite the criticism that it gets, it maintains a fiscal integrity,” he says.

Former Vice President for Financial Affairs from 1971-1977 Hale Champion also maintains that MATEP was, in the end, a good move for Harvard.

“The old plant was running down—it had to be replaced,” he says.

Champion adds that alternatives under consideration, such as nuclear energy, would have been even more expensive. “[MATEP] was probably less expensive than anything else we might have done,” he says.

He says the internal outcry against MATEP’s cost at the time was unfounded.

“Some members of the Faculty thought that they could have received in pay the money that went into the building—that wasn’t true,” he says. “Harvard was never in any financial trouble because of this.”

Uncertain Current

Champion says he regrets the time it took to approve the plant and points to poor project management and government indecision as major factors in MATEP’s demise.

He says the University’s administration initially hired a firm to design and construct the plant and another group to oversee the job—a watchdog for the project.

“You need to have somebody with the incentive to keep the costs down,” he says.

But when Champion left Cambridge to join the Carter administration, he says the watchdog firm was fired.

“That was a fatal, very costly mistake. The result was that the cost went way up,” he says.