“We really need space here,” Johnson says. “We are limited in our programs.”

GSE abuts residential neighborhoods, and any growth will have to be off-site. As a result, the school is widely seen as a candidate for a move across the river to University land in Allston.

While Johnson said it would be unlikely that a dean will be brought in specifically to plan for such a move, space issues will figure prominently on GSE’s future agenda.

Faculty stress, however, that there are other concerns more central to the school’s academic mission that deserve the attention of the new dean.

Education First

No great pedagogical debates currently divide the school’s faculty, but professors say that has not always been the case throughout GSE’s history.

At various times, the school has vacillated between providing practical, professional education for would-be teachers and sponsoring theoretical academic research.

After a period in which an activist GSE tackled social problems, the 1980s witnessed a turn inward for the school, as GSE got out of the “teacher-teaching business” and turned into a school of “number-crunchers,” Elmore says.

Now, he says, the school tries to balance training and practical research with more theoretical work.

But still, faculty say the new dean will need to set the school’s course in dealing with both the practical and theoretical pedagogical issues.

Deborah J. Stipek, the dean of Stanford University’s School of Education, says there is currently interest and pressure for schools of education to be relevant to K-12 improvement efforts.

GSE and other schools see this as a “window of opportunity,” she says.

In recent years, GSE has also increasingly implemented programs that involve the school in the surrounding community. Elmore praises these programs and says this type of practical involvement should be augmented by the next dean.

Members said that Summers assembled an advisory committee whose collective areas of expertise cover the wide range of issues that the truly interdisciplinary school of education must deal with. In addition to professors of education, the committee includes experts on psychology, the economics of education and public education policy.

FAS Professor of Government and committee member Jennifer Hochschild says that she brings to the committee some knowledge of the field of educational policy.