Harvard clearly thought it was being hip with its choice of Oprah as commencement speaker while ferrying Menino across the Charles for a little touch of local color.

We may be ivory tower, but we know our celebs and we’re down with the locals, too!

However, there are some big problems with this early honor for Menino, who still has several months on the job before his two-decade-plus reign comes to a close.

For starters, the honor rings a bit hollow given Harvard’s massive development and real estate interests in Boston and Menino’s long-standing role as the Hub’s virtual development dictator.

It may simply be a case of old fighters who have grown to respect each other – and, no, I am not suggesting anything untoward – though seen a certain way, it can look a bit cozy.

Perception counts.

But more importantly, for all his accomplishments, the record is still out on Menino’s long reign, and likely will be for several years.

It wasn’t all roses, boys and girls. Menino’s stifling of lively civic debate about development in Boston – and his handling of it – was a real black mark, or at least should be, in any honest accounting of his time in office.

Stifling Critics

Menino should certainly get good grades for being a strong leader, one who knew how to get things done by making City Hall work for him.

But Menino also knew well how to wield the city’s vast government bureaucracy to punish or stifle critics – a big problem given Boston’s longest-serving mayor is infamously thin skinned.

Menino takes offense at just about anything and everything, from a newspaper columnist’s mild criticism to a developer’s failure to personally inform him first, on bended knee, of plans for a new project.

One Globe columnist recently recounted being told that the mayor would never speak to him again. The offense? A piece criticizing the mayor for buying charm bracelets for departing staffers with money from a city-controlled nonprofit dedicated to spiffing up Boston.

But that’s old (read ancient) news to any reporter who has covered Menino on a regular basis.

Most politicians want a little plug here or there, but the conditions for staying on Menino’s good side all but prohibited anything beyond puff-piece journalism.

Basically, anything beyond waiting for the mayor’s latest pronouncement was frowned upon. In fact, showing some initiative and breaking some news, let alone an investigative piece, could get you frozen out by the mayor and his City Hall minions.

Defy the mayor in some small way and you could find yourself beaten on a story, handed out to a competitor who decided life would be easier following the rules, and sadly, there were more than a few who made that choice.

Since I was covering development for the Herald, not exactly the mayor’s favored mouthpiece, I quickly decided I could never win at this game and that I would write it as I saw it, even if that meant constantly looking over my shoulder.

Yet at times it felt like being a one-man band.

The fact is there were lots of stories about Menino and his handling of city government and development that probably never got written by reporters trying to stay in the mayor’s good graces.

And while Menino was not dishonest, he certainly favored some developer friends who he saw as tight-lipped and loyal, and who, in turn, wound up winning big development deals and occasionally juicy city tax breaks as well.

Ah, yes, the world according to Menino was a very different place.

With foreclosure rates and murders on the rise back in 2007, City Hall even tried to put out its own newspaper, “The Boston City Communicator,” packed with all sorts of “good” news, if you could call it that. Twenty-five of the inaugural issue’s 30 articles mentioned or featured Menino, with glowing coverage of his favored development projects and city programs.

The mayor’s mug could be found on 11 of 20 of the newspaper’s full-color pages.

The mayor even penned a column, headlined, unsurprisingly, “Communicating the Good News.”

It was soon dubbed the “Tommy Times.”

Muzzling Developers

That said, the game of watching what you say or do was a lot more high-stakes for developers, especially those who were unable to make it into Menino’s inner circle.

There is a long line of builders who fell afoul of the mayor at one point or another and wound up having to quit town or sit on plans that never went anywhere.

Sometimes the sin was a critical quote in the press, but in other cases it might have been an off-hand remark at a cocktail party or simply not rushing fast enough to kiss the mayor’s ring.

That was the case with a group of New York developers who thought they had a deal to buy the Filene’s building and blabbed about it to a local paper.

It turned out they had given a heads up to the Boston Redevelopment Authority, but not to Menino.

After that, the project was as good as dead and the would-be Filene’s developers moved on, with local developer John Hynes taking their place.

Now, Menino never had to declare a project dead; his minions in the City Hall bureaucracy would see to that, quietly smothering the plan with countless reviews and delays until the developer simply stopped kicking.

Anyway, the rest is history, with Hynes tearing down the modern half of the Filene’s complex only to run out of money after the Great Recession hit in 2008, leaving a big hole in downtown Boston for years.

It’s arguable that if the original developers had been allowed to simply apologize and proceed, there’s a good bet they would have gotten their project off the ground before the economy collapsed.

Menino’s thin skin put a lid on the kind of civic debate a great city like Boston needs and cost it opportunities as well.

What the mayor’s ultimate reputation will be is for history to decide, not Harvard. 

Scott Van Voorhis can be reached at sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com