City Councillor William H. Walsh says he finds the Harvard presence "very influential" in City Hall.

"They have the name and it's a pretty powerful institution and they can put together an extensive lobbying campaign," Walsh said. "They have a constant public-private lobbying effort."

In a pinch, if low-key pressure fails, Harvard lobbyists "can put out a P.R. campaign that can cost a few thousand dollars," says Ole Anderson, director of the Cambridge Committee for Responsible Research, an animal rights group.

Last fall, his organization tried unsuccessfully to put a referendum limiting experimentation on the ballot. Within weeks, Harvard, MIT and several commercial researchers had formed a political group, begun raising funds and commissioned a poll to gauge public views of laboratory animal use.

Mayor Alfred E. Vellucci, the best-known Council critic of the University, says he often writes back to the Corporation and the Board of Overseers to express his opposition to Harvard's stands.

Although he says University officials never lobby him personally, Vellucci says his method of responding to particularly intense Harvard pressure is to "put [the issue] on the table and bring [it] to the attention of a lot of people."

"Our relationship to government is like any constituent's," O'Neill says. "I don't like to see it as an adversarial relationship." The fact that others disagree means it's likely to keep Cambridge politics interesting for some time to come.