"[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."