Another of Murphy's main goals is to increase diversity within his school, bringing it to mirror the nation's population distribution more closely.

The Education School is already off to a good start, since its faculty is Harvard's most diverse. Its student body--about one quarter minorities--is also among the University's most diverse.

But continued faculty diversity is important to Murphy. He hopes to bring "young, perhaps really promising minority scholars" in as visiting faculty members for one to two years.

"If you worry just about getting people at the top," Murphy says, "you don't end up diversifying your faculty."

Plans like these, of course, call for money, a perennial need at the Education School. In his few months as dean, Murphy, who was previously an associate dean at the school, has already been on the road fundraising, collecting resources for the programs he hopes to implement.

"I don't think about fundraising as fundraising," he says. "I think of trying to get people to invest in the dreams...of people here at the school."

The task is central to a deanship, essential if goals are ever to be reached. And finding funds is more important--and more difficult--for the Education School than for almost any other Harvard faculty.

Former President Derek C. Bok used to compare the University's ten schools to free-standing tubs--each with its own endowment, its own expenses and its own fundraising efforts. The Education School is one of the smaller tubs, lacking a strong base of substantial alumni donations.

"The difficulty we face in raising money is that our alumni don't have it," Murphy says. Education School graduates are primarily teachers, and therefore notoriously low-paid.

Harvard, for many years, has been a tub-eat-tub world. Now, as President Neil L. Rudenstine prepares for a massive capital campaign, Harvard's schools are once again preparing to compete for University resources.

Rudenstine's academic planning process--in which deans meet to discuss their budgets and their goals--brings that competition to the forefront but is also intended to diffuse it somewhat.

Murphy is confident that his school will fare will among Harvard's other faculties. "[Rudenstine] is committed to the Ed School," he says. "That should help with internal allocation."

"I sense that people even in the well-off tubs recognize that `every tub on its own bottom' had been taken to a dysfunctional extreme," Murphy says. "There's a more cooperative spirit [now]."

To Murphy, cooperation within Harvard means sharing intellectual resources as well. A joint master's program in educational policy with the Kennedy School is in the formative stages. With the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Murphy hopes to explore joint activities in curriculum development and teacher training for math and science classes.

Murphy is also contemplating joint programs with the Medical School and the School of Public Health.