Robert Wolff ’53-’54, Social Studies’ Last Founding Father, Remembered as a Public-Spirited Philosopher

Robert P. Wolff ’53-’54 never stopped teaching.

At the age of 90, Wolff — the last surviving co-founder of Harvard’s Social Studies concentration — taught a course on the first volume of Das Kapital to roughly 15 Harvard faculty, undergraduates, and graduate students. The class ran in spring 2024, with Wolff Zooming into the course every Friday from a nursing home in North Carolina.

“It was one of those very rare Harvard events where people actually showed up, not because of some resume item, but because they were actually interested,” said Social Studies lecturer Bo-Mi T. Choi, who helped design the Das Kapital course.

History professor David Armitage, who chairs the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies, said Wolff’s last course “held us all spellbound.”

“Even on the Zoom screen, you could tell he was probably one of the most compelling teachers one could ever meet, a truly extraordinary man,” Armitage said.

Wolff was a wide-ranging political philosopher. He wrote a well-known defense of anarchism, studied Marx, criticized Rawls, and was known for writings on Kant. During his long academic career, he not only helped create Social Studies at Harvard, but also helped form the Social Thought and Political Economy program and the Ph.D. program in African Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

A self-described “radical,” Wolff was a lifelong activist who protested for nuclear disarmament, against the Vietnam War, and against South African apartheid. Many who knew him said his political commitments were inseparable from his scholarship and his life. Though he trained at Harvard, he left the Ivy League for UMass — a public university, and, according to his son Tobias Barrington Wolff, the first place he heard “spontaneous and genuine laughter” from his colleagues in the halls.

Robert Wolff developed a subdural hematoma following a fall in June of 2024. Despite his full cognitive recovery, he spent the fall and winter battling other health complications, according to an obituary written by his family.

Wolff died on Jan. 6 from an infection. He was 91.

He is survived by his sister Barbara Searle and his two sons — Patrick G. Wolff, an international chess grandmaster, and Tobias Wolff, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School.

At the Origin of Social Studies

“My father, for really his entire life, led a life of the mind,” Tobias Wolff said.

Robert Wolff graduated from Harvard College in 1953, at age 19. By the age of 23 he had completed his Ph.D. dissertation — also at Harvard — on the philosophy of Emmanuel Kant and David Hume.

He went on to pursue academia as an instructor at Harvard in 1958 and as a junior professor at the University of Chicago in 1961. Later Wolff became the youngest full professor in the history of Columbia University’s philosophy department. After leaving Columbia, Wolff joined UMass Amherst’s philosophy department, and upon his retirement, he taught courses at the University of North Carolina.

During his time at Harvard, Wolff was one of the founding members of the Social Studies concentration in 1960 and became the head tutor for the program’s first year. At its inception, the program admitted only 20 to 30 honors degree candidates a year, hoping to train them in cross-disciplinary thinking unconstrained by departmental boundaries.

Armitage said Wolff, in the 1950s, felt that the world’s problems were “so big that they cannot be handled by one single department” — something Armitage believes is still true today.

“He saw no distinction between his political commitments and his intellectual commitments and believed very strongly in the transformative power of teaching, which I think is something that we all very much see as a legacy we carry forward from his time in Social Studies today,” Armitage said.

‘Bob the Builder’

After leaving Harvard to teach at UChicago and Columbia, Wolff decided to move to UMass Amherst’s philosophy department in 1971 — having received “about as much validation and as much celebration from elite private education as one could,” according to Tobias Wolff.

Wolff said his father wanted to work at an institution with a more public mission, where teaching would mean “reaching a population of students who, perhaps, on average, had less privilege and opportunity walking in the door.”

At UMass Amherst, Robert Wolff once again laid the foundations for a new degree and new methods of study, helping develop the school’s Ph.D. program in Afro-American Studies. When African American Studies department chair Esther A. Terry was trying to get the program off the ground, she recruited Wolff from Philosophy to help hit the necessary quota of tenured professors.

“It was just kind of amazing that he went into a field that he really knew nothing about,” said Jennifer J. Wallach, one of Wolff’s advisees at UMass and the current divisional dean of humanities at the University of North Texas.

The summer prior to joining the department, Wolff read dozens of major works that colleagues recommended to him, Wallach recalled. Wolff’s project, she said, was his own version of completing the program’s course on 50 major works in African American studies.

“Every student reads the same 50 books and writes a paper about each book, and he basically gave himself that course over the summer,” Wallach said. “He did not just join the field to be an administrator. He wanted to learn about the field.”

Rita Reynolds, another one of Wolff’s advisees and the current chair of History and American Studies at Wagner College, recalled placing paper ‘Bob the Builder’ cutouts all over Wolff’s office while he was out. She and Wallach, her accomplice, waited with bated breath — only to receive an email from Wolff telling them he loved it.

Years later, Reynolds said, she thinks the name remains apt.

“He really was ‘Bob the Builder.’ He built up the program. And set it in such a way that when he retired, it continued to go forward,” she explained.

‘Putting Harvard Itself on Trial’

During the protests against South African apartheid that rocked Harvard in the 1980s, Wolff was deeply involved in the divestment campaign to force Harvard to withdraw investments from South Africa.

When Cambridge police removed 19 protesters from the steps of the Fogg Museum for attempting to block the entrance to a Harvard College Fund dinner in 1986, Wolff was among those arrested.

He was one of seven of the protesters to go to trial, rather than taking a plea deal. For Wolff, it was a chance to flip the script on Harvard.

“The trial is an occasion for calling attention of the public to the situation in South Africa,” he told The Crimson at the time. “We’re putting Harvard itself on trial for its investment policy.”

In 1985, Wolff co-founded Harvard and Radcliffe Alumni/ae Against Apartheid, which nominated slates of pro-divestment candidates to Harvard’s Board of Overseers. In 1986, the HRAAA helped Gay W. Seidman ’78 — an anti-apartheid activist who had served as The Crimson’s first woman president — pick up a seat on the board. In 1989, the group succeeded in electing Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

By the late 1980s, the Board of Overseers and the Harvard Corporation — the University’s two highest governing bodies— had adopted a policy of “selective divestment” that significantly reduced Harvard’s assets in South Africa.

Years later, when Wolff taught his virtual course on Das Kapital, he appeared on Zoom wearing T-shirts with slogans about South Africa and Freedom, according to Choi.

“My father both loved Harvard and also frequently felt frustrated with Harvard and felt the need to push Harvard to do better as an institution,” said Tobias Wolff.

For Robert Wolff, opposition to South African apartheid was connected to a contemporary campus battle: over universities’ investments in Israel. On his blog, Wolff wrote that Israel was both a “vibrant, lively, open democracy” for its Jewish citizens — and “an apartheid state” for Palestinians.

In May 2024, Wolff posted on his blog in support of the pro-Palestine protesters who staged an encampment at Columbia, urging divestment from Israel’s military actions in Gaza.

Wolff — who described himself as an atheist from a Jewish background, with a deep interest in Christian beliefs — wrote repeatedly of his horror at Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel and at Israel’s retaliation in Gaza.

“Every time I returned to my meditations on Marx, the world interrupts me with another horror,” he wrote in an October 2023 blog post. “And I do not even have the consolations of religion.”

A Lifelong Teacher

But for Wolff, hopelessness was not a way of life.

Sociology and Social Studies professor Adaner Usmani said Wolff persuaded students to care about their coursework by “imploring students to care about the world” — and by “telling jokes and telling stories about his family.”

“It is really important to try to make the world a better place, and I think that’s the ethos that Bob lived in his life,” added Usmani, who helped design Wolff’s Das Kapital course.

Mathew Duvalier, one of Wolff’s philosophy students at UNC and a current graduate student at the University of California Berkeley, took a leave of absence during his last semester at UNC due to family difficulties. Wolff reached out to Duvalier, offering himself as a mentor.

“I would read books that he assigned for me, and then he would give me things to write papers on, and he would give me very detailed feedback on the papers,” Duvalier said. “Books I needed, he just paid for.”

Tobias Wolff said his father was driven by a desire to understand the world’s complexities and then “share the clarity of his insight with as many people as he could.”

Revenue from Robert Wolff’s ebooks on Amazon is used to fund a prize at McMaster University in Canada for the best master’s essay. Wolff’s lectures on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, Freud, and Marx are available on YouTube for free.

—Staff writer Victoria D. Rengel can be reached at victoria.rengel@thecrimson.com.

—Staff writer Rauf Nawaz can be reached at rauf.nawaz@thecrimson.com.