Vague Faust reveals nothing about Allston

Drew Faust sat down yesterday with Charlie Gibson (a Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard for this year) for her opening-year dialogue. Here are the Allston-relevant excerpts from a couple sources:

Gibson Grills Drew Faust, Gets Few Details The Harvard Crimson

Gibson, the veteran ABC journalist and a current fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, pressed Faust on how she planned to recalibrate the University’s Allston expansion, but few details were in the offing.

Faust floated several ideas for how the University would proceed on the issue—including potentially co-developing the real-estate—but provided no specifics on the billion dollar construction project’s future.

“[Those properties] are going to be Harvard’s future, but it’s a future that is going to come much more slowly,” Faust said.

Gibson seemed frustrated at times with Faust’s lack of specifics, but in interviews this year, University administrators have been consistently deferring questions regarding the future of the expansion to a series of committees that have been set up to examine potential next steps.

President Faust on Finances, Scientific Misconduct, the Martin Peretz-Muslim Furor, and More

On campus development, Faust said Allston “is critical to the future of Harvard”—but visions for academic use would be realized “much more slowly” because of the financial crash. She insisted that the University now has no timetable for development, and is, as reported, emphasizing leasing of properties it has bought; community amenities; and explorations of options including commercial co-development—part of a broader “re-envisioning” that might yield a lively mixed-use community of academic, institutional, and private investors during the next 50 years.