Long before the House of Representatives passed legislation authorizing the creation of the Department of Education, the rumors flew hot and heavy in Washington. President Carter, education insiders believed, would name someone with experience in state education programs to head the department--someone like former New Mexico Gov. Jerry Apodaca, a Chicano, or Mary F. Berry, under secretary in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW), a Black woman.

Others, including Congressional liaisons in Washington's community of education lobbies, were certain that Carter would call on a managerial figure to oversee the new bureaucracy, the second cabinet agency he had created during his tenure. When Carter finally announced his choice--Shirley M. Hufstedler--an appelate court judge from California who was well known in legal circles but unfamiliar to educators--everybody was surprised, some were shocked and all were quick to offer an opinion.

Most surprised of all those involved was Hufstedler herself. When the White House was checking into Hufstedler's background, the 54-year old judge was on vacation in the hinterlands of Nepal, conquering yet another stretch of the Himalayas. When administration officials contacted Hufstedler upon her return to the United States, she assumed they wanted to talk legal shop. But when the officials suggested that Hufstedler take the 13th chair in the Carter cabinet, she was taken aback. But now, almost four months since her December 6 inauguration as the nation's first Secretary of Education, Shirley Hufstedler is too busy to even think about hiking in Nepal.

Buried in her fourth floor office in the far reaches of Federal Office Building No. 6, hidden from view by the endless expanse of her desk, Hufstedler is not what one would expect but already she looks at home. Many predict that she would not get comfortable so quickly. Coming from neither the education nor bureaucratic worlds, Hufstedler was an outsider in professions where people like to take orders from insiders. Because Hufstedler was not clearly associated with the interests of primary or higher education, people on both ends of the spectrum were angry about Carter's choice.

The Department of Education, after all, had only squeeked by the House by 14 votes and in the opinion of many, as one Congressman bluntly put it, Carter's support for it represented "a political payoff in every sense of the word." Then candidate Carter had picked up the first-ever endorsement of a presidential candidate from the National Education Association (NEA), the nation's most influential lobby for primary education, in return for his promise to build the department. Those who represented post-secondary education interests feared that, given the NEA's vital role in establishing the department and a Secretary who came from the primary sector, higher education's pleas might be ignored. Carter had to avoid alienating the NEA, however, which saw the Department as a down-payment for a 1980 endorsement. In the end, he picked the wisest and most politically expedient course--nominating an effective, respected public figure whose background was solid enough to arouse interest but vague enough to seem fair to all concerned.

For Hufstedler, as lobbyists in Washington point out, the first few months of her job demanded an acute awareness of the implications of even minor decisions coupled with a firm resolve to get the department off on the right foot. As the newest kid on the block, Hufstedler would have to hold her ground, ready to fight for her portion of the federal turf--money and manpower that other agencies would not relinquish without a struggle. Meanwhile, she had to avoid getting tangled up in the nuances of bureaucratic affairs that threatened to ground her well-laid plans.

With the first of many legislative chores--preparing and presenting the department's 1981 budget for the Congress--behind her,' Hufstedler seems to have settled well into her new role. "The difficulty," the 5 ft. 2-in. charcoal-haired Hufstedler says as she sits on a couch in her office, "is that all of these things have to be done at the same time." But, she insists, "we're not having any trouble putting it together beyond the routine things. It takes time to move people from one building to another," she explains.

Hufstedler has labored under less-than-ideal circumstances, trying to coordinate 152 separate programs, many of which (131) come from the old Office of Education in HEW but some drawn from departments as diverse as Labor, Agriculture, Defense and Justice. With employees under no less than 14 different roofs and headquarters shared by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Hufstedler's task would have confounded even the most experienced of Washington hands. Her critics say she had been slow to reform the bureaucracy, but Hufstedler faced with the unpleasant task of unraveling a third of HEW, perhaps the largest bureaucracy in the world, has done admirably. "Nobody can say she isn't trying," says one higher-up from HEW.

In what friends say is typical behavior, Hufstedler downplays any personal success she's had, saying that some "extraordinary and gifted people from inside the bureaucracy and out have aided her efforts." She smiles and puffs on a cigarette. "It isn't as if I'm trying to be a do-it-yourselfer," she explains. "On the contrary, I've had plenty of help." Hufstedler deals firmly yet succinctly with critics' worries. Of the department's 17,000 employees, 11,000 work in American schools overseas, she says. Most of the department's new employees are drawn from old bureaucracies, she adds, noting that, when it's all said and done, the department will employ fewer people than were employed in the programs it inherits. "It's not a huge sprawling bureaucracy at all," she insists.

When Carter formally signed the Department into law, many critics warned that the department, like its cousin the Department of Energy (DOE--the new department will simply be ED)--would have terrible growing pains. "The department will spend about two years thrashing around trying to figure out which end is up," a spokesman for the American Federation of Teachers, the group which lobbied hardest against the department's creation, predicted. Hufstedler dismisses such warnings and points to the difference between the DOE experience and her own. The issues surrounding energy, she says, are "set before a bewildering array of Congressional Committees within whom the Department of Energy had to deal. That's not the situation at all," says Hufstedler, who calls her department's set of issues "much more discrete."

In first exposure to a new environment, like any good judge, Hufstedler has made effective use of precedent. As a former lawyer--Hufstedler spent ten years with her husband's Los Angeles, Ca. firm of Beardsley, Hufstedler and Kemble before she began her rise in the California judiciary--Hufstedler says she is used to such interrogation. "I've been taking appeals for many, many years," says Hufstedler, whose record as a judge caused President Ford to consider her carefully when he looked for someone to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas in 1975. "To be sure," Hufstedler adds, quickly, "the setting is somewhat different, but the process is in reality very similar."

Many questioned the need for a separate department of education when Carter first proposed it, saying that it was an unnecessary addition to the bureaucracy the president had already promised to trim. But Hufstedler, speaking in measured tones, makes a good case for a unique, important role for her agency. "Undiluted by competing interest," education is brought promptly in front of the President and his Cabinet, she says. "In the various scattered programs in the huge agency of HEW," Hufstedler argues, the Secretary and his/her staff, distracted by different kinds of priorities, didn't have the necessary time to coordinate education programs. The new Department, Hufstedler believes, presents "an opportunity to make coherent programs that rather lived a life of their own in earlier incarnations of the Office of Education."

Hufstedler promises there will be no single spokesman for the interest of higher education--her own experience in the field, aside from passing work on law school curriculum, was limited to serving as a trustee for Occidental College and the California Institute of Technology--but says her efforts will be supported by those below. Hufstedler will be joined by the retiring Chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, Albert H. Bowker, who will be assistant secretary for post-secondary education. Bowker, whose long experience in higher education, particularly with larger institutions, bodes well for university interests.

But, the Secretary warns, education cannot be seen as isolated processes on different levels. "It's foolish to talk about institutions of post-secondary education" without thinking about the sources of those institution's students", Hufstedler says with conviction. "One addresses the issues, therefore, not simply in isolation but as a part of the full set of issues and problems that affect American education at all levels."

Hufstedler believes that good education policies can only be fashioned if there is constant communication and input from all concerned groups. "Students, of course, should and do have a very lively voice in the affairs of post-secondary education and their views should be heard," she says, adding tactfully, "They're not always right but they're by no means always wrong either."