Three different University vice presidents--the vice president and general counsel, the vice president of finance and the vice president of administration--have passed around responsibility for the office over the last decade. And managers and workers around the University have long complained about the central office's inefficiency and lack of direction.

Six years ago, Vice President for Finance Robert H. Scott and newly appointed Vice President for Administration Sally H. Zeckhauser got together to talk about what should be done with the Office of Human Resources.

"We agreed at that point that because I was an experienced vice president and she was new, we decided to keep it under me in finance," Scott says.

Under Scott, the office floundered. It's had six directors in the last six years, and it became so directionless and inefficient that many individual schools and departments lobbied for greater control over their own human resource functions.

In May 1991, Scott passed responsibility for the department to Zeckhauser, and she ran with the ball. Zeckhauser spent a year studying the department and getting input from University officials, many of them administrators in the different schools and departments. In the end, the arguments for decentralization presented by these administrators won out.

"What I was trying to do was create a collaborative office to reshape the center office to meet the needs of the schools overall," says Zeckhauser. "Certainly the model in the operations I've been working on is a customer service model." The customers, she says, are both the smaller human resources units and the people who work there.

Beyond the shift to a decentralized system that eventually emerged, Zeckhauser also formed a University-wide human resources policy-making council, ordered the development of an annual human resource plan (which Patrick refused to release) and expanded the size of the central office's monthly newsletter.

After Harvard Real Estate President Kristin Demong served a year as acting director, Zeckhauser hired then-University Attorney Patrick away from the Office of the General Counsel.

Patrick knew the ins-and-outs of human resources from her experience representing the office as a Harvard lawyer. Friendly and well-liked, she's won the trust of many staff members who feel they can approach her with almost any question. But Patrick acknowledges that her office remains largely distrusted by workers around the University who have long been promised change in the department, and have yet to see it.

"I would like to have the University look to this office for expertise in all of the areas of human resources and for assistance," says Patrick. "I'd like them to look to this office as a partner in planning strategically for the University."

"We have been in transition for so long that people wonder what our mission is," Patrick says. "We are in the process of defining what that mission will be."

Communicating that mission to workers and unions, however, has not been a strength of the Office of Human Resources. The customer-friendly department has a lot of unhappy customers like Hirtle. Among them:

* Security guards in the Harvard Police Department say the central office has for years ignored their complaints about discrimination and on-the-job harassment in their unit. In many instances, human resources officials referred guards back to police department administrators who already had dismissed their complaints.

Human resources officials won't discuss any specific complaints, but they suggest that the guards who have complained are trying to cover-up for spotty employment records. General Counsel Margaret H. Marshall has opened an investigation of the complaints, and hired a former FBI agent to conduct interviews.

* Employees of the University Health Services clinical laboratory say their UHS human resources coordinator, Karen G. Fischer, has long worked with laboratory manager Barbara Skane to quash employee complaints about everything from overtime to alleged improper packaging of lab specimens.