Sources say that FAS, which has historically been the strongest and most central of the faculties, is particularly worried about the growing role of the provost's office.

Publicly, FAS officials deny that tensions exist, but privately, some administrators say that they are concerned about Fineberg's activist role in academic matters.

"It's a combination of Fineberg's own self-confidence that he understands the Faculty and his own willingness to undertake initiatives, and the fact that there has been an opportunity to do so," says a senior administrator. "The provost is a graduate of the College. He has a doctorate from GSAS. He feels he knows FAS."

Those who support Fineberg stress that the tensions others perceive are in fact minimal, and say that the structural explanation for their origins is most important.

"Harvey's a very strong leader and the dean of FAS is also very independent," says a senior official. "There's a natural sort of chafing with someone who's exerting strong leadership and someone who prefers to be left alone. I think it has to do with the politics of bringing a university together when it's decentralized."

Whatever tensions others perceive are inevitable, regardless of who occupies the provost's office, says another official: "It doesn't have to do with him; it has to do with how much of a change it is to have a provost."

Some University administrators say privately that over the course of the last semester, Fineberg has been campaigning for the presidency, a concern that is part of their worries over the growing role of his office.

They say that the increasingly public initatives of the provost's office--such as the high-profile Mental Health Initiative, the provost's column on the cover of the Harvard Community Resource and even the prominence of the provost's biography on his web site--are insignificant individually, but taken collectively, are suggestive of a campaign for the presidency.