Word: cgis
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...most pressing item on Stone’s list was getting final city approval for the Center for Government and International Studies (CGIS)—a pair of buildings planned to unite the Department of Government and its related centers, a project that had topped the agenda of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) for a half a dozen years...
When Stone arrived, Harvard had received all the permissions for the CGIS except for the right to dig a tunnel underneath a busy city street, which would link the two buildings of the government center...
...helping to nix the tunnel, the City of Cambridge and its residents sentenced themselves to increased foot and truck traffic around the CGIS. Two separate buildings require two loading docks for trucks, but only one would have been needed if the complex had a tunnel. Neighborhood activists also foolishly passed up what Harvard claimed was a $5 million bargaining concession, including a million-dollar parcel of land designated for a park, a $300,000 donation to the neighborhood and a five-year moratorium on construction by Harvard in nearby blocks...
Harvard, for its part, refused to put on the table in any substantive way the usage of CGIS buildings and unreasonably prevented residents from acting as representatives for their Mid-Cambridge constituents during negotiations. Harvard’s stance on setting deadlines, for example, was so inflexible that even the University’s lone supporter among the Cantabrigians, Rick Childs, said he felt like “someone was putting a gun to my head...
Neither Harvard nor Cambridge should expect to gain from such dysfunctional and hostile exchanges, as the plight of the CGIS tunnel has so clearly demonstrated. Hopefully, however, the frustration over this disagreement, and the recognition that both parties would have benefited from the tunnel’s construction, will give way to a more cooperative spirit between the University and the city in the future. As the mutual loss of the tunnel has so clearly demonstrated, we are in this together...