Between Town and Gown

In recent years the relationship between MIT and the city of Cambridge has grown more collaborative and cordial.

By Sally Atwood

June 2003

When a new graduate residence hall opened last fall at 70 Pacific Street in Cambridgeport, the students held an open house. They invited the campus community and the neighborhood's residents to share dinner, friendly conversation, and guided tours of the building. About 130 residents attended, including Cambridge vice mayor Henrietta Davis, who arrived with a prepared speech that exhorted the students to be better neighbors. But after spending time with them, Davis confessed she couldn't give her speech: the students were, she said, already doing an incredible job of reaching out to the community. Today, Davis says, those graduate residents are the Institute's "best ambassadors" to the city. In fact, she says, virtually everything about the residence hall signals a new day in the relationship between MIT and Cambridge.

In the past, that relationship has been fraught with difficulty and, sometimes, outright hostility. "There's friction on every issue because we have different views," says Sarah Gallop, codirector of MIT's Office of Government and Community Relations. "It's not good or bad, it's just a fact of life." Thorny issues like zoning, planning, housing, transportation, parking, recycling, environmental impact, the local educational system, and, perhaps the thorniest of all, taxes arise regularly. MIT and Cambridge have negotiated their way around them all, with the city capable of stalling or stopping MIT projects. But in recent years the relationship has evolved toward what city and campus officials alike characterize as a very comfortable association.

According to people on both sides of the fence, increased communication and broadened outreach have been key to this evolution, and the Town and Gown Team, established on campus three years ago, has been instrumental in facilitating this improved interaction between the Institute and Cambridge government officials. On the outreach side, MIT has set up more opportunities for students to help in the community, through expanded volunteer programs, new service learning courses, fellowships that enable students to work with community nonprofit organizations, and a competition for funding specific projects that students develop with local nonprofit agencies. And MIT's increasing commitment to recycling and other environmental issues has also strengthened its relationship with the city. But while the present climate is better than it has been in more than a decade, any single issue could trigger a relapse of the more contentious relationship of years past. "We need to keep looking for more structured ways to communicate," says John Curry, executive vice president of MIT and head of the Town and Gown Team. "We need to keep the door open."