Administrators faced off against leaders of the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers [HUCTW] this week, with the University denying union charges that faculty and staff were deliberately excluded from a University task force created to examine the rising costs of employee benefits.

Several top level administrators have been drawn into the conflict with the union. Administrators, including the task force's chair Provost Jerry R. Green, have called HUCTW complaints invalid.

Green said the HUCTW leaders an members were invited to join one of several task force advisory committees, but declined.

And an official University statement, issued this week by Associate Dean of the Faculty for Finance Candace R. Corvey, suggested that union officials are guilty of distortions in their claims of exclusion.

"Several union officials received initial briefings and indicated a willingness to participate in advisory groups where various options could be explored," Corvey wrote in the statement.

"Other union officials, including the HUCTW leadership, declined the University's invitation to participate in the review process indicating that they were not in agreement with the approach designed by the Task Force," she wrote.

The statement concluded with an assertion that the University remains willing to "meet with the appropriate representatives to discuss and review various benefits programs."

But membership in an advisory group is not enough, HUCTW leaders said last week. Union President Donnie Williams charged that Green's process for reviewing benefits "is not one that includes any sort of respectful partnership."

Bill Jaeger, director of the 3,600-member group agreed. "This looks like a process that a small group of top-level highly paid administrators are trying to control very tightly," he said last week.

But administrators remain adamant that the procedures of the task force are as open and inclusive as possible.

Because of the time commitment and expertise required of Task Force members, faculty and staff were considered inappropriate members for the group, said Nancy L. Maull, the Faculty's administrative dean. The task force has been meeting to study benefits for more than a year, Maull said.

"With such a massive task before us--learning about and dealing intensively with a very complicated subject--democratic representations of all the constituencies which will be affected would be a logistical nightmare," Maul said.

Maull sad the task met throughout last spring and summer in order to become a "well-educated body."

She added that a two tiered structure, that of advisory groups offerings input to a main decision making body, seemed to be the most manageable options at the time the framework was conceived.

"The people on the task force are people who have been made responsible for solving this kind of problem," Maull said. "Their involvement reflects their mastery of some very complex subject matter."