James Watson shreds Harvard’s “Soviet” science plans
NOTE: This post was written in September 2007, prior to Dr. Watson’s comments in mid-October on race and genetics. We have been getting a lot of traffic on this post from that controversy. We completely disagree with his point of view on that issue. The post that follows deals with Harvard’s future direction in the sciences, part of which Watson referred to as “Soviet.”
I took this picture in 1999 in Kazakhstan where I lived for about two-and-a-half years. The statue says “Glory to Soviet Sciences” and sits next to a defunct pond in a ghost-town of an amusement park with a skeletal ferris wheel. When people talk about Soviet science, this is the image that comes to my mind.
James Watson minced no words in his article called “Blinded by Science” in the September/October 2007 issue of 02138 magazine–the private magazine aimed at Harvard alumni. “Paying top salaries is well within the means of the largest university endowment on earth–provided that the almost Soviet-style fantasy of the Allston expansion is abandoned.” As someone who has lived and worked in a Soviet fantasyland, I can assure you that he might not be too far off.
Watson’s remarks really make me think about a city planning experience I had with one of Kazakhstan’s former regional architects who was in charge of planning for the whole province and its capital city. The city was confronting rapid growth brought by billions of dollars in oil investments, and the architect had led his team in building a total of 16 scale models of what they wanted the new business district to look like. His question to our consulting team was, “How do I tell the corporations to build my plan?”
No matter how much money you have, when you have one person or group of people who control all the money that is going into a major development like this project, you will likely not address the many needs found in a city. Powerful groups play politics until they usually get their way and end up building concrete island as monuments to their own interests when they say that they intend to build a utopia. They don’t often realize they’re doing it either, and people get locked out in the process. I’m worried that that is what Harvard is in the process of doing.
I got my degrees from both universities that border the future Allston campus (adjacent to the Business School), and people living nearby are still unsettled by Harvard’s plans. I am going to agree with much of what Watson says in his article and add that one of the best solutions would be to sell off enough land to other parties to help bring a diversity of people and built structures to the area, while keeping enough for other expansion projects for the University that don’t just focus on providing a physical place for science at Harvard.
True success in science for Harvard will be in encouraging the expansion of thoughts and ideas, particularly by faculty and students who are as diverse in people as the Allston property should be in programming and activities.
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