In a field dominated by socially well-connected art historians and MBAs, David Ross, the new director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, doesn't quite fit. A 41-year-old with a degree in communications, he became the Everson Museum's - and the country's - first video curator in 1971. He continued to champion video and other Conceptual Art forms at the Long Beach Museum of Art, at Berkeley's University Museum, and at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, where he's been director since 1982. His attraction to the new and socially engaged made him one of the first Americans to mount major exhibitions of current Soviet art, and a fierce advocate of controversial art in the face of right-wing attack. At the ICA, he not only presented the Mapplethorpe show, but, when the NEA denied that institution a grant for a Mike Kelley show, urged his board of directors to fight back.

So what's a hip baby-boomer like David Ross doing at a place like the Whitney? With its four "McWhitney" branches in Fortune 500 headquarters (including Philip Morris's), its aura of social cachet, its too-frequent solo shows devoted to gallery superstars, and its trustees' public humiliation of Ross's predecessor, Thomas Armstrong, last year - the Whitney is probably more identified with corporate excess than any other museum in the country.

Can Ross bring progressive change to a museum that seems as emblematic of the '80s as a Christian Lacroix pouf? Will he be able to tame its strong-willed board? The art world is divided. Jules Prown, Yale art historian and chairman of the board's search committee, predicts that "Ross will reinvigorate the Whitney." But New Museum of Contemporary Art director Marcia Tucker - who characterizes a progressive museum as one that reflects diversity, challenges its own practice, and advocates open-ended interpretation - is more circumspect. "It's all doable at the Whitney. If the board is willing to support David when push comes to shove."

Ross and I talked over breakfast a few days after the Whitney's board of trustees ratified his appointment on January 9. (He took over February 4.) Although his hair is graying and his beard is gone, he seems exactly the same as he did when I first met him in Berkeley in 1979 - brash, brainy, and affable. He's got a diplomat's flair for discussing highly charged matters in common sense language, jettisoning buzzwords and encouraging a progressive consensus.

Ross's priorities will come as no surprise to any Whitney watcher. "Of course the building expansion is at the top of my agenda. It's been going on for, 10 years now?" he chuckled. In addition to the museum's physical expansion, his immediate plans include the hiring of a curator of collections and an education department head.

Other changes will await his on-the-job scrutiny. He's made no decisions regarding the museum's much maligned curatorial staff, he says courteously. And he politely refuses to speculate about the Whitney's always controversial biennials, although he agrees they do seem insufficiently diverse. As far as long-term exhibition and collecting plans go, look for increasing forays into photography - which the Whitney rarely shows and does not collect - and a modest internationalization of this museum of American art. The latter's purpose: to understand "the extremely hybrid nature of postcolonial American art."

Although all this seems conventional enough, Ross and his views on the place of the museum in contemporary society are not. What separates him from other museum directors is less a matter of age or training than outlook. MoMA's forty-something painting-and-sculpture department head Kirk Varnedoe and the Guggenheim's master builder Tom Krens are of the same generation. Unlike them, Ross has been radicalized by his experience of the '60s.

The Whitney - along with most major American museums - is regarded by many observers as a bastion of white, male elitism. "That criticism is justified; it's clear that a broader range of voices need to be heard," Ross said. "Artists are dealing with changing social conditions and we have a responsibility to reflect their ideas. Museums have been unwilling to do their part," he continued. "But it's too easy to turn on them in an inherently racist society. Let's talk instead about reexamining the entire system and the museum's role in that reexamination...We are a forum."

During his tenure at the ICA, the institute showcased a broad spectrum of work, ranging from last year's Soviet conceptual art show to "Endgame," an up-to-the-minute 1986 exhibition devoted to simulation in painting and sculpture. What's most striking about his exhibits is their variety and their emphasis on pointed themes. Scanning the list of shows presented under his stewardship at ICA, I was reminded of the odd coupling of back-to-back retrospectives of performance artist Joan Jonas and photographer Richard Avedon organized by Ross in Berkeley in 1980. "Some artists deal with contemporary social conditions by direct confrontation," he says. "And others by fanciful flights away from those realities." Ross seems to be interested in all of them.

From a larger perspective, Ross sees the museum as a "small part of the besieged educational system." Museums educate primarily through their exhibition programming and the values they represent. The conflicting history of such ideas is contained in a museum's permanent collection - and in the way it's presented. (MoMA curator Rob Storr's provocative reinstallation of his museum's postwar collection offers a vivid reading of recent art history and the central contribution of female artists to it.) Ross anticipates future reinstallations of the Whitney's permanent collection as a way "to explore the full range of ideas embedded in artworks, not just the single story you get from the standard [succession] of masterworks."

Talking about interpretations and ideas suggests museums' participation - along with what the media and advertising - in what Hans Haacke calls the "consciousness industry," purveyors of either progress or the status quo. People like Ross (and Kathy Halbreich, who picks up the director's reins at theWalker Art Center in March) advocate change, but for every perestroika there is a recalcitrant politburo; for every ACT UP, a Jesse Helms. If there's an entrenched status quo at the Whitney, it may be the museum's own board of directors.

The terms of the power struggle that forced Tom Armstrong out remain something of a mystery. In brief, Armstrong's critics pointed to his inability to get the Michael Graves-designed addition built, to the alleged superficiality of the museum's exhibitions, and even to rumors (apparently unfounded) that Armstrong is anti-Semitic. (Ross is Jewish.) All we know for certain, though, is that a divided board dismissed a long-standing director, for reasons never publicly articulated. Although the board remains essentially the same, William S. Woodside, leader of the anti-Armstrong faction, stepped down as president last June and was replaced by Leonard A. Lauder.

Ross claims he doesn't know what happened and professes even less interest in the board-director brouhaha. He anticipates no communications gap between the board and himself, because, he says, they'll set overall policy together. "I'm not an imperial director, but there's not going to be a lot of micromanagement," he insists. "They want me to manage the museum." Bolstering this claim is the board's recent amendment of the museum corporation's bylaws to make the director its CEO, a job previously held by the board president. Ross's record as a manager is impressive. When he arrived at the ICA, it was $1 million in debt; today it boasts an endowment of $2.2 million.

The new director has also taken out another form of insurance against potential board antagonism, insisting that the expansion project be rethought, yet again. "We're dealing with important questions that get asked only once every 30 or 40 years," he noted. "All the options are open, there are no sacred cows." Not even Michael Graves.

For their part, board members are ecstatic. "All of us at the Whitney are thrilled with the appointment," Lauder said. Given the length and intensity of the search - conducted over six months by an 11-member committee, goodwill isn't surprising. But many museum professionals I spoke with - though they admired Ross's abilities - wondered how long the honeymoon would last. "Best luck to him," said one. "But I wouldn't try to teach that old board new tricks."

Prown said that aggressive change was precisely what the search committee was looking for: Its criteria focused on the museum's need for greater cultural diversity and intellectually rigorous programming. He also asserted that "the general perception of the board as a conservative group that would retrench with an even more conservative director than Tom is wrong; it's the presss' idea. Most of this board is far more adventurous in its collecting and thinking than the museum." (Prown regards the "museum" as an amalgam of director, staff, and policy.) Lauder corroborated this assessment; board chairman and Armstrong-ally Flora Biddle disputed it. Armstrong refused to comment.

It's crucial to remember that the identities of cultural institutions mutate, that museums are infinitely more capable of reimagining themselves than, say, defense contractors. During the '60s, the Whitney was regarded as a dusty, bookish place that compared unfavorably with the trend-setting Jewish Museum. Cultural institutions are also peculiarly sensitive to the influence of dynamic individuals. It was Armstrong who arrived in 1973 and transformed the Whitney into one of the largest and most visible museums in the country.