The Social Thought and Political Economy program mourns the loss of our founding Director, Robert Paul Wolff, an emeritus UMass Professor. He passed away on January 6th, 2025. He was 91 years old.
Professor Wolff developed the STPEC program in 1972, modeling it off of a similar interdisciplinary undergraduate major at Harvard University for which he had been the first head tutor. As originally conceived, STPEC would task students with taking a combination of courses in the humanities and social sciences, capped by a series of junior and senior seminars. Professor Wolff co-taught the first of what is now the program’s Focus Seminars. He went on to serve as STPEC’s first director until Professor Sara Lennox succeeded him in 1981.
Professor Wolff’s contributions to STPEC helped to inaugurate what he later described as “a tradition that I think may be unique in American higher education, of developing a major not by consulting the wishes and wisdom of professors but by responding to the needs and demands of students.” In 2023, he rejoined STPEC for our 50th anniversary celebration.
Professor Wolff had a long and influential academic career, much of it at UMass Amherst where he taught in the Philosophy and later the Afro-American Studies Departments. He wrote widely on topics in political philosophy such as Western Marxism, systemic racism, state authority, political legitimacy, and liberal democracy. He was also active in the public debates and popular movements for nuclear disarmament in the 1950s and 60s, against the war in Viet Nam in the 1960s and 70s, and for divestment from apartheid South Africa in the 1980s and 90s.
Professor Wolff is survived by his high school sweetheart and second wife, Sue, his sister Barbara Searle, and sons Patrick Gideon Wolff and Tobias Barrington Wolff; Patrick’s wife Diana Schneider and their children, Samuel Emerson Wolff and Athena Emily Wolff; stepsons Lawrence Gould and Jonathan Gould and their wives, Suzanne Gould and Tamara Dyer.
An obituary for Professor Wolff is available here.