Harvard dining halls and faculty offices are not the only scenes of speculation about Harvard's hunt for a new president.

The same conversations are going on all across the country.

From Hanover, N.H., to Bloomington, Ind., to Houston, Tex., to nearby Wellesley, the talk occasionally turns to the Harvard president search and what it would mean if the committee asks the local chief executive to take the job.

For in addition to examining the ranks of Harvard's faculties for a new president, the search committee is surveying all of American higher education. And several university presidents are said to be high on the list of contenders.

Faculty and students at schools whose presidents are known to be under consideration take a variety of views of the process.

Sometimes the mood is pugnacious. "He would make a good president [of Harvard], but we will fight you to keep him," quips Myrtle Scott, the president of the University of Indiana's faculty council. Indiana president Thomas Ehrlich '56 is a contender for the Harvard presidency.

For others, the Harvard presidential search is a godsend. "Please take him," says Ben Shim, president of the Dartmouth Review, the ultra-conservative journal which has repeatedly clased with Dartmouth President James O. Freedman '57. He is widely mentioned as a top candidate for the Harvard presidency.

And some take advantage of the search to point out what they say is wrong with the nation's oldest university.

"We don't think Harvard is up to making a woman president," says Marshall I. Goldman, an economics professor at Wellesley (and associate director of Harvard's Russian Research Center). "Our concerns are tempered by that." Wellesley President Nanerl Keohane is also a candidate for the Harvard job.

Deep in the Heart of Texas

Along with Freedman, George E. Rupp of Rice University is most widely mentioned in media reports as the next president of Harvard.

Rupp, who holds degrees from Harvard, Princeton and Yale, left his post as dean of the Harvard Divinity School in 1985 to become president of Rice in Houston.

In his five years at Rice, he has spearheaded a massive fundraising and publicity campaign, boosted the size of the applicant pool, developed graduate schools, reformed the undergraduate curriculum and funded expanded research efforts.

Many in Houston say that Rupp has had his sights set on the Harvard presidency all along and that Rice was merely a means to his greater ends.

"I think a lot of people get the sense that this is the chance of a lifetime for him to [become president of Harvard]," says Jean Farrar, a member of the Rice Honor Council and the Rice Women's Alliance. "There is a sense that this is what he really wants and is what he's really wanted all along."