“He’s had his hand in virtually every aspect of the College that I can think of,” said Stephen A. Mitchell, a professor of Scandinavian and folklore who sat on the now-dissolved Committee to Review the Administrative Board with Pfister and served as Eliot House Master while Pfister was in Kirkland. “And so in that sense, he has a lot of things going for him.... He has seen things work.”

“He doesn’t have any ground to make up,” added former UC President Matthew L. Sundquist '09, the one student who served on the Ad Board review committee with Pfister. “He comes in on day 1 knowing how the College works in really every respect.”

In particular, students point to Pfister’s time heading the Ad Board review committee as experience that will serve him well in helping to guide the College’s ongoing conversation about academic integrity.

In 2009, Pfister’s committee issued a report that, among other proposed reforms, recommended further discussion about the creation of a second disciplinary board populated by students as well as faculty. Although such a board was not established following the report’s release, a recent honor code proposal has reignited the discussion.

The proposal, which Dean of Undergraduate Education Jay M. Harris presented to members of the faculty at their monthly meeting in April, outlines a five-point honor code that, among other points, would establish a Student/Faculty Judicial Board made up of both students and faculty to hear academic dishonesty cases. The Committee on Academic Integrity plans to solicit feedback on the proposal from students in the fall, according to Terah E. Lyons ’14, who serves on the committee and also helped draft the proposed honor code. In his capacity as Dean of the College, Pfister will chair the Ad Board as these discussions proceed.

Colleagues also nearly uniformly praise Pfister for his ability to connect with students, citing his almost two decades as a House Master.

“I don’t think you could get better training than somebody who’s been in the trenches in a House,” Dean of Freshmen Thomas A. Dingman ’67 said.

A CALL FOR TRUST

But even with this experience, students caution that in his new role, Pfister will be hindered if he cannot reverse undergraduates’ skepticism and frustration with College administrators, which they say partly stems from this past spring’s email searches scandal.

In March, news broke that administrators had secretly searched resident deans’ email accounts to trace the source of a leak of a confidential Ad Board document pertaining to the Government 1310 cheating investigation. Several weeks later, Hammonds admitted to faculty at their monthly meeting that she had secretly authorized a second set of searches of a single resident dean’s faculty and administrative accounts without the necessary permission, thereby violating Faculty of Arts and Sciences email privacy policy.