OVER the summer, a post opened in the top tier of Harvard's management. Financial Vice President Thomas O'Brien left to run the business school at UMass/Amherst, and Vice President for Administration Robert Scott moved up to fill his place.

An administrative vice president is responsible for the types of logistical matters that can make heaven or hell of undergraduate lives--as well as several that can make Harvard either an innocuous neighbor or a threat to local communities.

Until recently, Scott ran Facilities Maintenance and the euphemistically named Dining Services and oversaw the folks who publish course catalogs.

He also ran two departments that have made the Harvard name into an epithet for residents of the world immediatly outside: the Harvard Planning Department, which directs the University's expansion in ways that sometimes sacrifice other people's neighbor-hoods; and the Co-Generation Management Company, which runs Harvard's Medical Area Total Energy Plant (MATEP).

This plant sparked protest in Boston's Mission Hill district over the past decade because its smoke was considered a health hazard. State estimates predict that four more people will die of lung cancer over the next 40 years because of nitrogen dioxide pollution belched from the plant.

Vice Presidents for Administration have made quite a few enemies for the University--but the next appointee, with luck, may put an end to this tradition.

IT HAS little chance of ending if the rumor is true that Harvard Real Estate President Sally Zeckhauser is Scott's likely successor.

Harvard Real Estate was founded in 1978 to replace the University's ill-coordinated Real Estate Office. First as acting director, and then as president, Zeckhauser has been responsible for the company's great financial success from the beginning.

Since 1978 the company's holdings have grown from about $8 million worth of property to many times that figure--HRE spent almost $30 million on purchases of land and buildings during the past year alone.

Zeckhauser's successes show her to be a competent administrator. But with the qualities that might fit her for this promotion comes a record of insensitivity to the community.

HARVARD Real Estate's sins are better known than its successes, but the worst parts of the company's record show that it is run with few scruples even by the standards of an ordinary business.

It certainly does not live up to the standards of an institution that considers itself a bastion of idealism. "People apply a different standard to Harvard's commercial real estate operations than they would to a commercial developer," says Gladys Gifford of the Harvard Square Defense Fund.

During Zeckhauser's tenure HRE has:

--run the hapless shuttle bus system.

--evicted the Thomas More Bookstore from its home on Dunster Street to replace it with a pizza parlor.

--tried to tear down a 93-year-old building at 8-10 Mt. Auburn Street, evicting rent-control tenants whose right to remain is still being thrashed out in the courts.

--tried to exempt the Craigie Arms apartment building on Mt. Auburn Street from rent control. The structure--since replaced by a modern development--was allowed to run down until its broken intercom system allowed two men to enter an apartment and rape a tenant.

--has made a practice of selling off medium-sized houses under rent control to small land-lords who in turn qualify under the city code to evict rent-control tenants.

THESE EXAMPLES are only the most publicized ones. They represent a pattern of cutting corners and stretching the law. Often this pattern hurts the University's finances and its public image almost as much as the tenants or students involved.

Harvard's administrators should not bring Zeckhauser closer to the academic side of Harvard. And she's done too much damage to Harvard's relations with the outside community to deserve even greater influence in dealings with Cambridge and Boston.

By giving her this position, the top levels of Harvard's administration would show that they like Zeckhauser's way of doing business. Let's hope they don't.