As the yet-to-be confirmed Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, Nye may not want to return to Cambridge in time to become dean. Harvard omitted his name from the course catalog's list of government faculty this year.

* Wiener Professor of Public Policy David T. Ellwood. Like Nye, Ellwood is a natural choice. A labor economist and welfare expert, he was academic dean under Carnesale.

But as the Clinton administration's point person on welfare reform, Ellwood is actually making his theories into national policy. Does he really want to abandon the job to deal with irate faculty and well-heeled alumni?

* Former Wiener Professor of Social Policy Mary Jo Bane. As a one-time commissioner of the New York State Department of Social Services, Bane has as much administrative experience as any other candidate. As a woman, she may prove attractive to a school which, according to the 1994 Affirmative Action Plan, lacks gender and racial faculty diversity.

"We just don't have the women faculty we ought to have," Pratt Public Service Professor Lewis M. Branscomb says. "Maybe if we're lucky we could get one back as dean."

But Bane, too, is firmly ensconced in the government elite. She is Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services for Children and Family.

* Ford Foundation Professor of Science and International Affairs Ashton B. Carter. Carter was director of the Center for Science and International Affairs. Like Nye, his expertise is in international relations, which could be a plus--several faculty say the school's foreign scholarship should be beefed up.

Like every other widely-cited inside possibility, however, he's in Washington. Carter is Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear Security and Counter-Proliferation.

* Altshuler, perhaps the most obvious candidate, has repeatedly denied wanting the post, colleagues say.

A past dean of the New York University Graduate School of Public Administration, Altshuler has the administrative background and, as a former Massachusetts state secretary of transportation and construction, the governmental experience to lead the school. But rumor says he left NYU to get back to research: why leave one bureaucracy to lead another?

Altshuler declined to comment.

A Wish for Stability

Whoever the final choice is, though, many hope he or she will end the revolving door in the Kennedy School dean's office and bring some needed peace to the school.

"One thing you'd hope is the next dean comes and stays for awhile," says Dwight H. Perkins, Burbank Professor of Political Economy.

Carnesale provided such stability, but only for three years. After years of mushrooming growth and a huge fiscal crisis, he helped raise money and bring together a badly divided faculty.