Few college presidents are as tied into Boston’s business community as Gloria Larson, the president at Bentley University. So she was a natural choice when John Fish looked to build a bridge to the bigger universities in the area, home to most of the region’s athletic venues.
Jon Chesto
Managing Editor, Print- Boston Business Journal
If you’re trying to handicap how Greater Boston would stack up against its three potential U.S. rivals in the race for an Olympics bid, this region has at least one key selling point: There’s a college or university on almost every block.
As a group of business leaders pulls together local support for a 2024 Olympics bid, it’s becoming increasingly clear how important our higher education sector could be when the U.S. Olympic Committee makes the call next January.
READ MORE about the business leaders who are trying to bring the Summer Games to Boston.
Gloria Larson, Bentley University’s president, tells me she’s working with Katie Lapp, executive vice president at Harvard, and Israel Ruiz, MIT’s EVP, to reach out to local university leaders and discuss the 2024 Summer Games with them. Larson anticipates working with many students, administrators and athletic directors in the coming months.
Perhaps most importantly, the Summer Games would need to use college facilities, and tap into some of our colleges’ fund-raising prowess, particularly in places where new athletic venues fit into institutions’ master plans. A new swimming facility that would need to be built for the Olympics is being discussed as a university project. (Some of the seating would likely need to be temporary, given the Olympics’ outsized needs.) UMass Boston has been considered as a host for the athlete’s village, needed to house some 16,000 people during the Games, in part because UMass officials are weighing the need for dorms as the school grows its enrollment and becomes less of a commuter school. Dan O’Connell, the CEO of the Massachusetts Competitive Partnership, says an athlete’s village would probably be built by a private developer with a long-term university lease in hand.
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