Each month President Neil L. Rudenstine and the deans of Harvard's eleven schools lean back in the plush chairs of Mass. Hall and talk. On the agenda is everything from the use of the Harvard name to the establishment of the University's international outposts.

It is a scene that, before Rudenstine's tenure, would have been unusual to witness at Harvard, a university whose professional and graduate schools have traditionally been fiercely independent.

But now it seems that the highly autonomous schools of the University are slowly coming together, if in a very informal, ad-hoc manner.

The Academic Advisory Group is one indication of the integration of the University.

The group brings the president, Provost Harvey V. Fineberg `67 and deans together to share their plans and criticisms.

"We give each other ideas," says Joseph S. Nye, dean of the Kennedy School of Government. "It gets flows of information that are horizontal and not just vertical."

"It has the function, by exchanging information, to get us to see the University in larger perspective," he adds.

Although Fineberg noted that regular meetings of the president and the deans have been held at least since he was dean of the School of Public Health in 1984, Rudenstine formalized them under the name the Academic Advisory Group.

Rudenstine has made this sort of initiative his signature song. The group, now more active and influential under his administration, represents the president's continuing efforts, since coming into office in 1991, to centralize the administration of the University and encourage communication between the University's separate schools.

"Regular meetings of the deans also promotes understanding among the deans of common issues and distinctive circumstances facing the different faculties," Fineberg says.

While the group has no real governing power, in the past few years, it has been extremely influential in several of the University's new ventures, such as the Asia Pacific Center in Hong Kong.

For the rest of the year, Harvard's role in the international arena will probably be a hot topic. Rudenstine says that his travels this summer to the Far East gave him "a renewed sense of how crucial the international agenda" would be for Harvard.

International programs require serious discussion of faculty, facilities and capacity, according to the president, and he says the process must be collaborative.

The Asia Pacific Center was a product of discussion among the group--particularly among the Kennedy School, the Business School and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the schools that will primarily be using the facility.

In addition, as greater media coverage of colleges and universities puts greater pressure on Harvard to present a united front, collaboration between the schools becomes indispensable. The differences between Harvard's ten schools might be glaringly obvious to its administrators, but the rest of the world sees only one Harvard.