It's a task that demands a miracle worker. The first permanent dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study will attempt to take a $350-million endowment and transform it into a world-renowned center for learning at an institution with no students, no permanent teachers and no specific focus.

When the Dean's Selection Committee convenes for the first time this Sunday, the group will be looking for a rare visionary who can build the Institute into an academic center fit to sit alongside Harvard's nine faculties.

And it's a tall order to fill.

"This is a particularly challenging search," one administrator says. "In some ways, [the deanship is] very attractive. But in some ways, it's an unknown."

First, the dean must be a woman. This, Acting Dean of the Institute Mary Maples Dunn insisted last spring, is "essential."

In addition, her academic credentials must be sufficiently stellar to make her tenure-quality at Harvard. Usually that requires a professor to be at the pinnacle of her field.

Sources say if the committee chooses a dean without a solid scholarly background, they risk marginalizing the new Institute before it has a chance to establish itself.

Harvard hasn't found many such women--currently only 13 percent of tenured professors in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences are female.

Narrowing the field further, she must be more than a scholar, but also a proven administrator. Radcliffe is a tangle of research centers, graduate programs like the Radcliffe Publishing Course and seminars for the general public. And that's before the Institute even creates programs of its own.