Russel foresees changes to grad student life

His office is not adorned with lots of orange and black U-Store paraphernalia or Old Nassau knickknacks. There is no Princeton degree on the wall. But after serving as one of the most active and accomplished faculty members for 28 years, the soft-spoken William Russel of the chemical engineering department has earned a reputation as a true University stalwart.

Now he has a new challenge: to figure out how to keep a diverse group of more than 1,900 students — some married with children, others young and single — happy in staid, suburban Princeton.

Newly minted as dean of the Graduate School, Russel is taking on more than just a second floor office in Nassau Hall. A dean's position carries a whole different set of responsibilities — so much so that the search committee considered going outside the University to find the right person for the job.

In the end, however, Russel was marked as the best candidate, and President Tilghman said she could not be happier with the committee's choice.

"Dr. Russel has the perspective of a longtime faculty member," she said in an interview. "He knows the University very well, he's trained many grad students over the years and, above all, he's just a really decent human being."

Though Russel is the first member of the engineering faculty to hold the position in more than 20 years, Tilghman said that Russel's science background has given him the experience he needs to handle the major issues facing the Graduate School in coming years.

Tilghman said Russel's largest challenge will be helping academic departments strike a balance between preparing graduate students academically and, at the same time, competing for grant money necessary for cutting-edge research.

A humble Russel is quick to note that he is taking over the Graduate School after eight years of significant improvements under the leadership of John Wilson.

"For a number of years before 1994 [when Wilson took over] graduate education was under stress," he said. "The morale was not that great. Since then, a number of buildings have been renovated, more support has been given to students pursuing Ph.D's and additional money has been allocated by the University for fellowships, which takes some of the pressure off of the individual departments."

But to graduate students, housing is the most pressing issue.

Russel said he thinks the University takes good care of its graduate students. By providing housing for more than 74 percent of them, Russel said the University is well ahead of most other schools.

But many graduate students still complain about their housing situations. Cole Crittenden GS, who has not met the new dean, described the common grievance. "The University is generous to house so many of us — at a lot of other schools we would be fending for ourselves. The problem is that we are forced to move to a new building every single year," he said. "A lot of grad students stay at Princeton to study over the summer . . . the move is a big, unnecessary interruption."

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Russel acknowledged that more needs to be done to improve student life.

Plans for housing renovations, to both the Graduate College and Butler Apartments, are in the works. And with the addition of Whitman College, there is talk of sprinkling a few unmarried graduate students into the undergraduate residential college system — just so that the two groups have a few more opportunities and settings in which to interact.

Those issues, and more, lie ahead. For now, Russel is just trying to get comfortable with new surroundings.

He is in the process of moving his family into the refurbished Wyman House — a building adjoining the Graduate College that has long been set aside for the Graduate School dean, but not always inhabited. He said he will even eat many of his meals with the students.

"[The food's] actually pretty good," he said.

A commitment to being accessible to the graduate community is an example of the efforts that have set Russel apart from his talented colleagues during his long tenure at the University. In addition to being chair of the chemical engineering department from 1987 to 1996, Russel, a graduate of Rice and Stanford universities, has also worked for the Princeton Materials Institute, the Princeton Environmental Institute and many administrative committees.

The University's graduate students are counting on his wealth of experience to guide him through a new, and different, role.