An Instrument of Change

As the new dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) sees it, he's in the same boat with the students beginning their graduate careers.

Mason Professor of Music Christoph Wolff said he is just getting comfortable after two weeks in his new office.

"I'm just trying to deal with the reduced activity as a scholar and teacher," Wolff says. "But the administrative chores are interesting and fascinating. They show a different perspective of academic life."

While Wolff officially replaced former Dean Brendan A. Maher last July, he only assumed his role two weeks ago upon returning from his native Germany.

He has inherited a school that faces financial and academic challenges, but is undergoing a renaissance in student body cohesiveness and activism.

Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles says he selected Wolff for the deanship last spring because of the music professor's ability to handle the position's broad scope of responsibilities.

"I was looking for someone who is experienced, thoughtful and eclectic," Knowles says. "The eclectic is important because he has to cover everything from anthropology to zoology."

Wolff, who first came to Harvard in 1976 as a professor of music history, has accumulated extensive administrative experience while in Cambridge. He has served as chair of the music department for eight years, and last year filled in as acting director of University libraries.

While concerned with the school's financial matters, Wolff has also pledged to make the deanship a position from which he can better relate to department chairs and assess the progress of the individual graduate programs.

"In previous years there has been less of an opportunity for the chairs to interact with the deans, as the office was regarded as primarily financial," Wolff says. "But I would like to deal with individual academic progress, which is what graduate school is all about."

Although Wolff says that he is looking forward to increasing his administrative activity, he admits his first love will always be his academic endeavors. In addition to his administrative duties, Wolff will teach a graduate seminar in music history and advise several dissertations.

Wolff says he will stress his desire to interact with students when he addresses the graduate school this Friday. He says he will announce open office hours and an improved advising system.

In addition, he says he wants to foster a greater unity among graduate students by revamping the student government and extending Dudley House's function as the center for graduate life on campus.

"Graduate life can be lonely, and the isolation in which [students] work is not very productive," he said. "I would like to create more of a community."

One of his advisees, Kathryn J. Welter, a fourth year graduate student and the president of the Graduate Student Council, says Wolff will be able to continue the commitment to the students shown by Maher, the previous dean.

"[Wolff] is a professor who's been in contact with students and is very understanding of what a graduate student is," Welter says. "He invites respect, one wants to earn his respect, and he treats his students with respect."

Welter, who has taken three courses with Wolff, says "he was in total command of the subject and able to spark my interest in the topic."

While former Dean Maher gave Wolff a head start with bettering student life with Dudley House, Maher has been less successful in shortening the number of years students take to earn their graduate degrees.

Knowles and Wolff both say students take too long to obtain their degrees, which forces the University to pay for more loans and causes stagnancy in the academic system.

"It is improper for somebody to be 30 years old before they embark on an academic career," Knowles says.

Wolff says one of his primary challenges in the next three years will be to work on this problem.

"It is hard to determine what created this situation. But enormous increases in tuition required students to take on more teaching responsibilities which left them little time to pursue their dissertations," Wolff says.

"I agree with Maher that we have to resolve the problem [of long graduate careers]," Wolff says. In the humanities where the average time to complete the dissertation is eight to nine years, the problem is especially acute."

Wolff says that students also lack incentive to finish their dissertations promptly because they have difficulty finding employment in their fields.

"Another setback is the shrinking academic marketplace," Wolff says. "In 1994, the federal law which required retirement for academicians will expire, aggravating an already dismal hiring pattern caused by the recession."

Wolff advocates the establishment of an alumni network, saying it may alleviate some of the students' anxieties.

"What we need to do is come up with a more viable support system and improve alumni connections to reduce the financial worries of students," Wolff says.

Wolff also expects to face the issue of minority hiring and recruitment, an issue that has been a significant concern at graduate schools around the country.

Although he says he is aware of the problem, Wolff is skeptical that substantial change will take place in the near future because the minorities tend to be attracted to professional schools.

He explains that the humanities, including music, "tend to require a bourgeois background of students. Minority students will find it less of a difficulty to develop an interest in law or medicine."

"This fact reflects social and education traditions which are hard to change from my position," Wolff says. "But we will try as hard as we can to locate those who have developed an interest."

Wolff says he does plan to tackle the skewed male-female ratio on the faculty, where he hopes to see "real progress."

Administration officials and colleagues at Harvard say they are confident that Wolff will perform his new duties as well as his former ones.

Larsen Librarian of Harvard College Richard De Gennaro lauds Wolff's efforts during the latter's short tenure as acting director of the University libraries.

"We all thought he was an outstanding administrator, a good leader and an enormously versatile person," De Gennaro says of Wolff's time in the library. "He came in and hit the ground running."

And that, De Gennaro says, is precisely what Wolff is doing now.