YOU'VE PROBABLY HEARD a lot about public service since arriving at Harvard. The University in general and former President Derek C. Bok in particular have consistently stressed the importance of serving the larger community--breaking out of the Ivory Tower.

And you may have heard that the resources committed to this task are hardly sufficient.

But what you may not have heard about is how unwisely the available funds are spent. In fact, more than $117,000 spent per year on the Office of Public Service Programs (PSP) is a waste of scarce public service funds.

WHAT DOES PSP DO? A range of activities amount to support work for the Phillips Brooks House Association (PBHA). They help get housing for the PBHA summer programs, they spend about $13,000 for educational programs at PBHA, they help coordinate PBHA activities with the University.

All of this could be done by PBHA dealing directly with the relevant University authorities. But that is not happening--perhaps to gain more administrative control over PBHA.

A second group of activities can be called general public service promotion. The main vehicle for this is the biannual Connections newsletter consisting mainly of students reflections about public service.

This paper, which claims a readership of maybe 200 students, can probably claim the prize of being the least read newspaper at the Harvard. I have yet to find a students who has actually read Connections--excluding its past or present contributions.

But we are not talking about a paper with a tiny circulation serving a limited audience. Connections has a circulation of a whooping 13,000 per issues--i.e., two per undergraduate (one for the common room, one for the bedside table?) which makes it by far the largest newspaper serving undergrads. One of PSP staffer spends a significant amount of her time working on this paper. The printing costs alone are likely to total at least $8000.

Other promotional activities in the past included the poster listing service providing food and shelter. The poster repackaged publicly known information about human services in Cambridge.

The only new thing was the Harvard name at the bottom so as to the advertise the administration's concern for social issues. The 1400 copies of the poster cost $3000 last year. The project was discontinued for lack of the response this year.

In addition, PSP attends national conferences on public service, duplicating the attendance of PBHA representatives. These activities are at best a waste of money, at worst another attempt to replace real commitment with presence at meetings and conferences.

A third rubric of activities fall under the term control. PSP organizes and sits on a number of important committees on public service. Most importantly, they sit on the committee dividing up funds from the president's Public Service Fund, totaling around $120,000 a year.

Most of the Funds go to PBHA. But PSP, in concert with a committee consisting of Harvard administrators, most of whom have little or no connection to public service, wields significant power over who in PBHA gets how much.

Another committee directed by PSP is the Public Service Advisory Committee, In the wake of the infamous Stuart case, in which Charles Stuart shot his wife in the Mission Hill area and then blamed a Black for the crime, the Advisory Committee decided that it should suddenly be concerned about the safety of volunteers going to minority neighborhoods in Boston.

Just like the Boston Police Department, PSP fell prey to Stuart's correct and devilish estimation that urban violence turns into a public problem only when Blacks are said to commit crimes against whites.