As museums become larger and more complex institutions, the question of who is best suited to run them — Ph.D.s or MBAs — becomes a fraught one. Those who believe art historians should hold the top posts are rooting for the success of a new program called the Center for Curatorial Leadership.

Directed by a former curator at the Brooklyn Museum, Elizabeth Easton, and funded by a president emerita of the Museum of Modern Art, Agnes Gund, the new program is a four-week fellowship designed to train curators in the skills they need to become museum directors. In January 2008, the first class of 10 curators will come to New York for two weeks of what Ms. Easton called “boot camp”: finance courses in the morning, talks by museum directors in the afternoon, dinners with trustees of various New York institutions in the evening. In the spring, each curator will spend one week at a museum other than his or her home institution. The group will then convene for a final week in May or June, probably in Los Angeles. There will also be an aspect of mentorship; for the six months of the program’s duration, each curator will have regular phone discussions and consultations with a current museum director.

The CCL is not the only program of its kind — the Getty Foundation runs a well-respected course called the Museum Leadership Institute — but it is the only one to be specifically for curators, and free to the participants. Ms. Gund, who started a similar program at Harvard, has committed to funding the CCL for three years, at an annual budget of $500,000.

Since the program was announced two weeks ago, Ms. Easton said, she has received an “enormous” number of e-mails from curators interested in participating. Applications are due on July 31. Selections, to be made by an anonymous committee of current and former museum directors, will be announced October 1.

For Ms. Easton, the seed was planted at the 2005 meeting of the American Association of Museum Curators, when a question posed by a curator to a panel of board chairmen led to a vigorous discussion of the prospects of curators advancing to director positions.

Thirty years ago, it was “unthinkable that a museum director could be someone who was not an art historian,” the curator in charge of 19th-century, Modern, and Contemporary art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gary Tinterow, said. Today it is not at all unthinkable. With museum directors charged with managing large endowments and myriad departments — publications, education, legal, fund raising — boards are increasingly looking for people with administrative experience.

Ms. Easton’s previous boss at the Brooklyn Museum, for example, Arnold Lehman, did not come from a curatorial background; he was hired primarily for his fund raising track record and enthusiasm for audience building. His methods have been controversial. Ms. Easton left the museum last year, along with two other curators and two trustees.

A major museum headhunter, Malcolm MacKay of Russell Reynolds Associates, said the changes in museums’ traditional purpose — such as their increasing involvement in education and community development — can create confusion. “You could argue that this is a golden age for museums,” Mr. MacKay said. “On the other hand, you could argue that their mission has gotten less clear.”

Perhaps because of the complex — and occasionally conflicting — job requirements, there is a lot of turnover in director positions; the executive director of the American Association of Museum Directors, Millicent Gaudieri, estimated the average tenure to be between five and seven years. And as another headhunter, Victoria Reese of the firm Heidrick & Struggles, said, “The pool is continuously shrinking, of curators who not only have the skills but who want to step up to the director level, given the complexity and also the risk of leading a museum today.”

Everyone interviewed for this article said the added perspective on their institutions that curators will get in the CCL program is valuable. What effect it will have on their job prospects remains to be seen.

There are currently close to a dozen director positions open, including those at the Kimbell Art Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Walker Art Center, and the Phillips Collection. How much difference would a credential such as the CCL program make on a curator’s résumé?

“In itself, it wouldn’t be a major factor,” Mr. MacKay said. “More and more, boards are looking for an actual track record, as opposed to any educational credential. And one of the problems with the museum world is there aren’t a lot of opportunities to learn and test your skills before becoming a museum director.”

“There’s less of a willingness to take a risk,” the director of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Kimerly Rorschach, said. “People like Philippe [de Montebello, the director of the Met], and Jim Wood [the longtime director of the Chicago Art Institute], achieved their jobs when they were less than 40,” Ms. Rorschach said. “Now that would be unheard of. But I think we need to get more people into the pipeline, so it’s not just a musical chairs of directorships.”

If the CCL program won’t in itself be the credential that gets someone a job, it may have more subtle and gradual effects. “She’s also allowing people to identify themselves as wanting to be [directors], and that is maybe the most important thing,” the director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, Thelma Golden, said.

And it will call the field’s attention to the problem of training people who can take on the diverse responsibilities of museum directorships. “We in the arts are only beginning to realize that we need to identify and groom talent,” the director of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, Axel Rüger, said. Mr. Rüger did the Clore Fellowship while he was a curator at the National Gallery in London, and without the training he got there, he said, he wouldn’t have had the confidence to apply for his current job.

“At any decent company, they’ll have fast-track training programs,” Mr. Rüger said. “But we in the arts have hardly ever done that. We assume that you study art history and somehow through osmosis you acquire these skills. Plus, it’s expensive. But the arts world needs to invest some of its resources in developing talent.”