By Derek Hawkins

At 7 a.m. tomorrow, polls will open and Boston voters will begin the election of the city’s 13-member City Council. At the end of the day, when the final ballots are tallied, many of Boston’s political observers and media outlets predict one candidate will be on his way to entering a fifth consecutive term on the council. The candidate is Chuck Turner, and he represents Northeastern’s own District 7.

Regardless of whether the predictions prove true, however, Northeastern is bound to feel Turner’s presence in the coming years as much as ever.

Turner was elected to the council in 1999, but his legacy as one of the city’s most prominent community leaders and political dissidents spans almost a half a century. And in recent years, Turner has brought that legacy to the doors of Northeastern.

Challenging Northeastern’s institutional growth in the past decade, Turner, a former Northeastern employee and professor, has protested several of the university’s major development projects on the grounds that they have “encroached on the surrounding neighborhoods” – in particular, his home district of Roxbury.

“Northeastern is a predator,” he said. “There’s a history of Northeastern disrespecting the neighborhoods around it, and its abuse of the community has become more flagrant in past years. It is a typical example of an institution that has a lot of lip service, but focuses on what it’s doing and what it wants regardless of the community.”

Northeastern officials have rejected Turner’s accusations, defending the university as a benefactor, not a predator.

“We have a healthy disagreement,” said Joseph Warren, a special assistant to the director of government relations and community affairs. “On some things I think he’s dead wrong. We’re trying to become a first-rate institution, but that doesn’t mean we’re not fighting for the same things.”

Vice President of Public Affairs Robert Gittens agreed, saying Turner does not express the mainstream views of his district.

“We have worked with him on some of the issues that he’s raised,” Gittens said. “He’s obviously been an advocate for a point of view in the community, but I don’t believe he represents the totality of the opinion of the community that he has tried to articulate.”

Jeffrey Doggett, director of government relations and community affairs, and several other Northeastern officials, did not respond to or declined requests for comment for this article.

Turner, 67, has a reputation for standing up to institutions and holding social and political authorities to the fire – often to defend the rights of workers, low-income families, prisoners, women and people of color. He has created and worked for countless organizations to advocate for them and has used his position on the council to do the same.

But what Turner is most well-known for is his approach: He is a champion of civil disobedience.

In more than 40 years in Boston, he has participated in countless sit-ins, one of which took place in the mayor’s office. He has hand-delivered letters of protest to some of the city’s largest institutions, including Harvard University. He was once part of a coalition that sued the city of Boston. And he’s consistently marched alongside his supporters in rallies.

Turner has been arrested on at least 20 of those occasions, several of which have occurred during his eight-year tenure on the council.

Amy Goodman, host of the progressive radio program Democracy Now!, once called Turner “Boston’s best-known dissenter.”

“He is someone who lives by principle – to a fault, some would say. But to that end, he plays a really vital role on the council,” said At-Large Councilor Sam Yoon, Turner’s friend and colleague. “He has about literally twice as much life experience as I have. That’s a perspective that he brings to the history of this city.”

Turner, a Harvard University graduate with a degree in government, became the first director of Northeastern’s African American Institute in 1969, and taught African American studies courses and served on university advisory boards for years. However, that has not deterred him from fighting what he and many of his supporters perceive as an institutional expansion that threatens the survival of Roxbury and other nearby communities.

“Many of us believe that … Northeastern is actively searching for land as well as housing that they can take over,” Turner said. “If we don’t stop them we’ll be facing what many neighborhoods have faced – an institution that eventually gobbles up the land and turns a neighborhood into one large dorm.”

That charge – that Northeastern is, in fact, looking to build beyond its borders – has been disputed by Northeastern officials, including Warren.

“The major concern is that Northeastern is expanding into the community and taking away housing,” Warren said, who has known Turner for more than 30 years. “Each time someone says that, I say, ‘Show me.'”

The first example Turner points to is St. Botolph Terrace Apartments, a row of Section 8 housing Northeastern purchased last month from Kenneth Guscott, a Boston developer.

Turner, along with the residents of the apartments and the Massachusetts Alliance of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Tenants, has charged that the deal was made in secret between Northeastern and the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA). In October, Turner supported residents when they delivered a letter to President Joseph Aoun protesting the sale.

“My concern is the betrayal of trust of the BRA that didn’t inform myself or the residents that they were going to do what they said they weren’t,” Turner said in an interview with The News last month. “The second concern is that it’s just a further indication that Northeastern intends to grab as much land in Roxbury for its expansion while claiming to build dorms on their property.”

Officials from Northeastern and the BRA, citing a letter delivered to Turner and five other elected officials last March expressing the university’s intent to buy the property, said the deal was completely transparent. Northeastern has also promised not to convert the housing to student or non-rental housing until 2023.

However, Turner said he feels the purchase will benefit the university at the expense of residents.

“How does [Northeastern] explain taking housing from mothers and children?” he asked. “They have to live with the question of, ‘Are we going to be able to stay here until 2023 or will they find a way to drive us out?'”

One Northeastern student lives among the 52 families in St. Botolph Terrace Apartments. The student asked not to be named because the issue is ongoing.

Turner’s objection to the purchase of the apartments this fall was not his first confrontation with Northeastern in recent memory. It’s not even the first this year.

During the summer, Turner and dozens of local residents picketed at Parcel 18, the site of Notheastern’s 1,200-bed residence hall project currently under construction at the corner of Ruggles and Tremont Streets.

In that case, Turner and members of community groups, including the Lower Roxbury Residents Leadership and the Roxbury Builders Guild, accused Northeastern of failing to meet hiring standards for the project.

For the project, Northeastern had said it would adhere to the Boston Residents Job Policy, a good faith agreement between the university and the abutting community. The policy, which the BRA adopted in 1985, requires 50 percent of worker hours on a construction project be local residents, 25 percent be minorities and 10 percent be women.

In July, Northeastern had met none of those standards at the Parcel 18 residence hall project.

Joseph Warren, who has coordinated community outreach for the project, attributed the failure to inadequate planning.

“We started the project before we did enough outreach,” he said. “When Chuck starts talking about jobs, he’s talking about me. On this one, Chuck was right.”

Warren recalled an ad hoc meeting that took place in mid-July and involved himself, Turner, Senior Vice President for Administration and Finance Jack McCarthy and representatives from Lower Roxbury Residents Leadership. At that point, he said, McCarthy was unaware Northeastern was not meeting the policy’s standards.

“Chuck looked over at me and yelled, ‘You don’t have any minorities from Roxbury on this site.’ Jack looked at me and said, ‘Is that true?’ It was,” Warren said.

McCarthy was unable to comment on the incident.

However, by October Northeastern had exceeded the standards of the Boston Residents Job Policy, according to statistics from the BRA and community groups.

Kerrick Johnson, director of the Roxbury Builders Guild and member of the leadership group, attributed the improvements directly to pressure from the community.

“Now Northeastern is proving you can meet and beat these numbers, but it takes a close relationship with the community,” he said. “I’m quite positive they wouldn’t be doing this if we weren’t making them.”

Warren disagreed, saying the lag in hiring was not an indication that Northeastern hadn’t intended to adhere to the policy.

“We started late. It was a catch up job,” he said. “The fact that Chuck pointed that out was not a bad thing – it was embarrassing, but not a bad thing. But we’ve improved and we’re doing very well now. Where’s our ‘atta boy’ for delivering?”

While not on Northeastern’s main campus, the site of the coming residence hall is Northeastern property. Northeastern bought the land from the Bank Of Boston in 1996, under former President Richard Freeland. It spans a strip of Columbus Avenue and Tremont Street from Ruggles Station past Davenport Commons.

The decision to build the residence hall was not in Northeastern’s original plans for the site, Gittens said, but came in early 2007 after more than two years of negotiations with local residents, community organizations and elected officials aimed at housing more students on campus.

Among the project’s most vocal supporters was Massachusetts State Senator Dianne Wilkerson, whose district encompasses Roxbury.

In response to what she said was a substantial lack of on-campus housing, Wilkerson said she focused on garnering community support to help move the project forward.

“Northeastern has always managed to have a small number of the faithful who are willing to take them on their word,” she said. “I considered myself among them at one point.”

However, Wilkerson’s faith turned to distrust as Northeastern began work on the residence hall. After the project’s inception, Wilkerson said the university reneged on commitments it made to the neighborhood during the negotiation process, among them the jobs policy and a community benefits package.

“There are people in the community that supported them moving forward based on the expectation we would work out the details later,” she said. “But there has been nothing worked out to date. I for one would never trust them to do anything they say they’re going to do again.”

Turner, who said he opposed the residence hall plan from the beginning, has accused Wilkerson of flip-flopping and hasty decision making.

“If it hadn’t been for Sen. Wilkerson’s advocacy they wouldn’t have been able to develop there,” he said. “But now you have her calling Northeastern a great danger.”

Wilkerson would not address questions about Turner.

Construction of the residence hall at Parcel 18 is well underway. Two red cranes and the metal framework of what will become the 22-story building loom above Ruggles Station. It is scheduled to be complete by 2009.

Northeastern officials said Roxbury residents stand to gain from the business spaces the university will allow on the ground floor of the building, and a benefits package that includes a youth development program, small business promotion and job guarantees for locals.

But Turner remains skeptical.

“This is the largest single project that NU has ever built,” he said. “[T]he fact that they’re doing the right thing now doesn’t mean that they should expect us to stand back and not press them.”

In many cases beyond Parcel 18, Turner has pressed.

During the 1996-97 academic year he objected to the development of Davenport Commons on Columbus Avenue for what he said was a lack of community input. In 2004, he helped convert Northeastern leased apartments on Hemenway Street into affordable housing for residents. And in 2005 he unsuccessfully fought alongside Fenway residents to prevent Northeastern’s purchase of St. Ann University Parish from the Archdiocese of Boston.

In other instances, like the construction of the West Village buildings and the planned conversion of Cullinane Hall into Residence Hall K, Turner has not contested Northeastern’s decisions to develop.

“The question now is, Where do we go from here?” said one Northeastern official who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue. “Northeastern is running out of undeveloped land. If we can’t develop outside campus, the next step is to demolish existing property.”

Turner has a solution: stop building. In the coming months, Turner said, he will work to propose Northeastern place a 25-year moratorium on buying land in the surrounding community.

“We’ve struggled very hard to build a community in lower Roxbury,” he said. “The financing of those housing developments is fragile. What we need as a community is a significant period of time to solidify the neighborhood before allowing Northeastern to make any more encroachments.”

That is a commitment Turner said he intends to follow through on – whether he wins in tomorrow’s election or not.

– News staff reporter Marc Larocque and News correspondent Daniel Stoller contributed to this report.