Former Dean Heads for Beacon Hill Post

It's not that far from Harvard Yard to beacon Hill for Richard A. Kraus.

Kraus, the former administrative dean for the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS), has been a state senator from Arlington for the past eight years. And now, he is making a bid to take over the office of state treasurer in 1990.

"I never expected, ever, that I would be running for a statewide office," Kraus says. But he added that his time in the Legislature and as assistant director of admissions and financial aid for the College gave him a valuable perspective on the job.

"It isn't just a guy coming out of Harvard," says R. Victor Jones, Wallace professor of applied physics. "He's been in the legislature for eight years, and one might expect that someone coming out of academia wouldn't survive in the dog-eat-dog world of politics, but he's done very well."

Kraus, who has a Harvard Ph.D in economics, says some people criticized his University experience as useless because "politics don't go according to the book on Beacon Hill." But, he says, those people don't know university politics.

"The politics involved in running a big university are very similar to the politics of running a state government," Kraus says.

Kraus began working on financial aid problems at GSAS during a "crisis time," Jones says. The government had cut support for graduate education. So in a system dubbed the Kraus plan, he devised a means for allocating the remaining resources "as equitably as possible...when people were used to a different type of lifestyle."

"Kraus' plan was the germ of the system that is currently in place," Jones says. "The system was based on financial need, which was a new idea for the grad school. And at that point, Harvard [was in] a pioneering situation."

And Jones adds, the situation is "not dissimilar from where the state of Massachusetts is now in terms of available resources."

But Kraus says he never considered seeking a statewide office until his friends urged him to apply his background to an office riddled with problems.

The treasury, he says, "has become so identified with patronism, cronyism and sweetheart deals from one's friends."

"It is not an office that has broken the law, as far as I can tell," he says. "But wherever the law hasn't been exactly clear about what has to be done, people have walked very close to the line of illegality and done things that are very wasteful of the state's [funds]."

And Kraus says his legislative experience gives him a personal motivation for seeking the office that Robert Q. Crane has held for the past 25 years.

"One of the things that got me hooked into this is that I was a legislator for many years and amassed a large number of services for helping people at many levels," he says. "And I have seen in effect that legislation go down the drain because people lost faith in the government of Massachusetts so that they are not willing to fund those services."

Called "tough-minded," "questioning" and "creative," Kraus is known to those who worked with him at Harvard as an innovator.

"He's willing to take bold, risky strokes, rather than just tinkering at the edges," says Seamus P. Malin '62, director of the Harvard International Office, who worked with Kraus in the undergraduate financial aid office.

And Jones credits him and Rep. Nicholas A. Paleologos (D-Woburn) with pushing through a creative statewide plan for improving education.

"It's easy to have political ideas, but if you can't get them through the political process, it's no good," Jones says.

All these factors, friends say, make him ideal for the job of state treasurer.

As former Senator George A. Bachrach puts it, "It's quite unusual that you find someone so well matched for a particular job. I mean. God forbid that someone with a Ph.D in economics be a state treasurer."