A Singular Promotion

HARVARD University finally has a woman vice president. Sally Zeckhauser last week was promoted after nine years as head of Harvard Real Estate (HRE) to become the University's Vice President for Administration. The University is to be congratulated for taking a major step towards an integrated administration.

Zeckhauser's accomplishments are undisputed. Beginning in 1979, she built up HRE from a disorganized collection of apartments worth about $1 million into the city's largest landlord with a budget of $40 million.

It's unfortunate, though, that our enthusiasm for the promotion of a woman to the exclusive realms of Mass. Hall must be tempered by our misgivings over Zeckhauser's record. She has not shown herself to be an administrator sympathetic to the Univeristy's responsibilities to the surrounding community.

Several of Zeckhauser's successes over the past nine years have been won at the expense of HRE's tenants. Two years ago the company tried to remove 60 apartments in the Craigie Arms apartment building from the rent control lists, sparking furor in the community. It continues to take rent-controlled apartments off of the rolls by selling them to small landlords who can legally evict tenants. In addition, tenant activists charge that HRE skirted the law in cases like those of rent-controlled buildings at 8-10 Mt. Auburn St. and 1306 Mass. Ave.

Unlike her predecessor, Vice President for Finance Robert Scott, Zeckhauser also will oversee HRE, a job currently performed by Vice President Daniel Steiner '54. In placing HRE, the Harvard Planning Department, and the Facilities and Maintenance Department all under one administrator for the first time, it appears that the administration is continuing its effort to make the University's real estate operations an integral part, rather than a satellite, of the University. We only can hope that the administration does not mean by this promotion that it wants to extend HRE's way of doing business across the rest of the University.