Matthew Murray, Harvard University,
Kennedy School of Government and Harvard Law School

Higher education, town/gown relationships

Working with the Boston Redevelopment Authority, I now have a much clearer and more detailed knowledge of and appreciation for the inner workings of the City of Boston. This is particularly true with respect to its process of development approval, the goals of its planning and development efforts, and its difficult financial situation, largely caused by its high reliance on new development to expand its property tax base to fund the city’s continuing operations.

Perhaps the most interesting knowledge I gained has to do with the politics of local government, internally and with respect to colleges and universities. I have seen how community groups react to college development plans, and I have seen the result of tensions between neighborhood residents and college students from the city’s perspective. It has been particularly interesting to see the BRA and the city play a mediator or intermediary role between universities and local community groups, since the city has clear interests in responding to and supporting both these sets of players.

While helping the BRA manage various college and university institutional master-planning processes, I was struck by the difficulties of collecting and compiling some kinds of basic data related to jobs and land use.  Some questions about local businesses that seem straightforward to members of community task forces, for example, are incredibly difficult, if not impossible, for the city to answer because of their specificity and because it is quite difficult to compare certain types of data about local businesses over time.  I am a strong believer in evidence-based decision-making, and it has been useful to get a glimpse of the difficulties involved in collecting citywide data on a variety of topics.

I provided the city with insights from academic literature and examples from other cities of efforts to promote life sciences based economic development around colleges and universities.  In particular, I made various recommendations to the city about how they might work with Harvard to best achieve growth in Boston’s life sciences sector by building on Harvard’s emphasis on life sciences in its planned campus development in Allston.  I also cleaned up and organized data about student residence patterns provided by Boston colleges and universities in compliance with the University Accountability Ordinance into useful tables and created an electronic template that will be used by schools to report their data in the future. I helped the BRA manage a variety of institutional master planning processes for local schools (e.g. Harvard, Suffolk, Northeastern, etc.), and I also developed a list of student internship and consulting-style programs that the city will use as a resource for future summers and projects.