Young doesn't comment on specific individuals or their statements, but she says she tries to deal with each case on its merits.

Patrick defends Young's performance. "I don't find that office to be rigid," says Patrick. "I, too, read what [Young] said, and even if she said that it doesn't show any evidence of rigidity. It simply means the agreements proved to be in favor of management in the individual cases."

If workers outside of the department are unhappy, those who work on the sixth and seventh floor of Holyoke Center have not always been content either.

Workers who have been with the department during the past six years describe it as having been a difficult place to work because of the lack of continuity.

Last summer, in order to scale back the central office, human resources offered 73 employees a voluntary severance plan. Twenty took advantage of the offer--twice as many as the department had expected.

"We've hired seven or eight people this year, because more people took our incentive program than we planned," Patrick says. She says the rapid reduction in force temporarily hurt the department's effectiveness.

Patrick and other officials say different employees had different reasons for leaving, but they acknowledge that some were unhappy with working conditions and did not want to undergo another administrative shake-up.

Beneath all the official, reasoned explanations for the recent change in human resources is a hope that decentralization will take hold, and Harvard's workers and managers will live, for the most part, in harmony.

In interviews, officials in eight of the local human resources offices said they were pleased with the experiment of decentralization. They don't see as much of the central office as they did two years ago, and they like it that way.

But no other Ivy League school has as decentralized a human resources administration as Harvard. Some officials at other schools wonder how so many local, autonomous departments can ever make the University-wide changes in areas like affirmative action that are dictated by college presidents and labor law. Ken Freeman, director of employee relations at Dartmouth College, says decentralization prevents bold initiatives and progress in people managing.

"With centralization, we're given a higher probability that you're complying with federal laws," Freeman says. "At Harvard, when it first happened, there were a lot of people who weren't competent to administer labor law."

The failure of the recent five year plan to promote affirmative action around the University may be indicative of a problem with decentralization. And with President Neil L. Rudenstine urging the University's departments to come together, an active decentralization policy may be at best unproductive and at worst untimely.

"When Rudenstine first came on board and he talked about making the University one place. I'd hoped he'd also make it one workplace," says Williams, the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers president. "What we've seen is the exact opposite."

Rudenstine disagrees, and says he supports the notion of autonomous units as long as they cooperate with one another.

"Ideally, you want local representation," says Rudenstine. "That means clearly you're going to have a certain amount of local decision-making go on. If you had only a central staff, I'm not quote sure how that agreement would work."