Former Harvard administrator L. Edward Lashman, for example, is now Dukakis' secretary for administration and finance. And Kristen S. Demong, the governor's chief fundraiser during his 1988 bid for the presidency, now heads Harvard Real Estate, which manages the University's non-academic land holdings.

Several dozen state leaders have been through management training programs at the Kennedy School. And among Dukakis' critics, it is a common complaint that the executive branch is populated with "Harvard hacks," Barrett says.

"There is considered to be an old-boy network," Barrett says.

But in the House and the Senate, the Harvard name does not carry much weight. Many lawmakers come from blue-collar backgrounds and tend to distrust the University. Most efforts by Harvard to exert pressure on the state would be ineffective, if not counterproductive, Barrett says.

"The Massachusetts legislature is a rather funky place," says Barrett. "It's neither tilted for or against Harvard."

On many state issues, Harvard tends to operate in conjunction with other state colleges and universities, Casey says. Many of these efforts can be traced back 20 years, when Harvard and several other institutions joined together to create the the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities in Massachusetts (AICUM), to lobby for increases in the state scholarship fund.

Although the vast majority of Harvard's students come from out of state, approximately 10 percent are Massachusetts residents, consequently eligible for financial aid from the state government.

AICUM Vice President Roger F. Sullivan credits the lobbying group with dramatically increasing the state's yearly contributions to its scholarship funds, from $4 million a year in 1970 to $84 million today.

But although all schools in Massachusetts share a common interest on the scholarship issue, Casey says, other pieces of legislation have a disproportionate impact on large research institutions like Harvard, MIT and Boston University.

In these instances, he says, Harvard finds itself negotiating with lawmakers alone, or in conjunction with one or two other universities.

Such was the case this summer, when officials from Harvard and MIT joined together "to take care of technical problems" in a proposed piece of legislation, meeting with the sponsors of a bill which designed to regulate production of environmentally hazardous waste.

The bill passed by the legislature in July is intended to reduce by 50 percent the amount of toxic waste generated in the state by 1997.

Although Casey says the law was aimed at eliminating the waste production by large industrial chemical companies like Dow Chemical Corporation and the Monsanto Company, early drafts of the bill contained certain "technicalities that would have been overly burdensome" to several Harvard programs.

In its initial form, the bill would have mandated strict state scrutiny on all materials used in projects that utilized even small amounts of a single toxic chemical.

According to Casey, this provision would have buried many Harvard researchers under a mound of paperwork. Ironically, scientists exploring safer alternatives to the targeted chemicals would have found themselves particularly susceptible to the onerous requirements.