Excerpt: The Pre-History of Simmons Hall
- There was also a small matter involving a lawsuit filed by your neighbor. The owner of Cambridge Executive Enterprises, the company headquartered right next door on Vassar Street, is a man named John Donovan. I don’t know too much about him, except that he is a former MIT professor who left the Institute on what I’ve been told are not-so-friendly terms and started a very lucrative business training executives in information technology.
- While no longer affiliated with MIT, he seems to use his location on the MIT campus to promote his business. Donovan has also established some kind of record for being involved in numerous lawsuits. If you read the Boston Globe, you may have seen a series of stories describing how he is currently engaged in lawsuits with many of his own children. I’m not making this up.
- The granting of a special permit to construct Simmons Hall next to his own building allowed Donovan the recourse to file a lawsuit against it. This lawsuit was filed in February of 2000, on the last day in which appeals to the permit could be filed, and in the end this lawsuit delayed the construction of Simmons Hall by about eight months.
Source: MIT