The school currently rents out space to accommodate its facilities, which has resulted in a spread-out campus. A new campus would offer “more space, and space that’s not disparate,” said Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education Howard E. Gardner.

Given its needs, the GSE wants to be proactive with its desires.

A similar Allston committee at Harvard Law School (HLS) recommended in 2002 that the school occupy prime riverfront property if it moved cross-river. The success of that report in helping convince University President Lawrence H. Summers to keep HLS in its current home has shown the importance of producing compelling Allston reports.

“To a certain extent, these reports are exercises in persuasion,” said Gardner, who is a member of the GSE Allston committee. “If one of the schools or one of the interest groups...makes a very persuasive case for how they want to use the space, it’s more likely they’ll get it.”

The organization of a new GSE campus is one of the major issues that the committee did not resolve, according to Gardner. He said he personally supports creating a “museum of learning” to showcase the various ways in which people learn.

“I think the biggest sticking point is whether there ought to be some education facility, particularly a school, around which the campus would center,” Gardner said. “Should we simply have a bunch of buildings that are connected, or should we have something else that’s a central metaphor for the school, like a school itself? That’s been where there’s no consensus yet.”

—Staff writer Stephen M. Marks can be reached at marks@fas.harvard.edu.