Those are not exactly disjoint campuses--the new one (part of Allston, not Boston) is just across the Charles from the other. (Admittedly, a good distance from

Those are not exactly disjoint campuses--the new one (part of Allston, not Boston) is just across the Charles from the other. (Admittedly, a good distance from center to center, but Harvard (including Radcliffe) is already 2 miles from end to end. (I know, because I used to have to race from one to the other between classes at times.)) The real scandal with the Allston campus is that Harvard was buying it up piece by piece (most of it was admittedly pretty useless--train yards and trucking distribution points) using front corporations for the past 2-3 decades. Only recently did they come out and admit what they'd been doing. I suppose there's some argument that they had to keep things quiet while buying, in order to discourage speculators from competing with them. Now Allston is faced with a huge tax loss, though Harvard does voluntarily pay a property tax fee of $80M a year to Cambridge (or used to). That's probably a lot less than the commercial value of that land, but the non-commercial value of Harvard's central presence in Cambridge is hard to calculate.