Paula Wolff was born in 1945 in Washington, D.C., the second of three children (two girls and one boy) to Jesse and Elizabeth Wolff. Her father is a corporate lawyer for a Manhattan law firm; her mother stayed at home and raised the family. She grew up in Mamaroneck, a Westchester County suburb. She attended public schools until her sophomore year, when her parents “decided I needed to learn to punctuate and spell” and enrolled her at Rye Country Day, a private school for girls. She graduated with honors.
In the fall of 1963 she went to Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts, the same private women’s school her mother had attended. She majored in government, and studied under political theorist Leo Weinstein. “Weinstein told us that to understand government you must understand that simply writing about who votes how on what issue does not tell you the whole story. You have to understand what motivates people to act, what values they are following. If issues are important enough to people, they aren’t going to be stopped by the fact that they don’t have enough votes.”
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The civil rights movement was cresting, and many of Wolff’s peers headed south to teach in freedom schools. She thought about joining them, but didn’t. A few activists organized a chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society at Smith, but she didn’t join them either. She opposed the war, but was not deeply involved in the antiwar movement.
So she enrolled in the University of Chicago’s graduate department of political science and studied under Weinstein’s mentor, the legendary political philosopher Leo Strauss. “I was in culture shock, coming out of an all-girl school where the downside is that it’s a very artificial social environment in which you don’t live in the reality of the double gender world. On the other hand, having gone to an all-girl school, I had no reason to think that men were smarter than women, even though most men at Chicago–and most women, to a degree–had been conditioned to believe that was the case.”
Her dissertation was on the Constitutional Convention and observed how many of the delegates had had to abandon or compromise their principles in order “to produce a workable document.” After that she taught public service at Governors State University, and in 1976 was named staff director of a bipartisan panel on reorganizing state government. Impressed by her efforts, an aide to James Thompson asked her in 1976 to work on the governor-elect’s transition team.
Thompson made her his “program coordinator.” For the next 14 years she wrote budgets, settled crises, and helped oversee every program the governor implemented. She was known as “Thompson’s conscience”–a dubious distinction, since Thompson was known for cutting funds for public education, general assistance, and other programs for the poor.
Marilyn Katz, a local publicist who supported Wolff’s campaign for chancellor, goes beyond that: “She’s brilliant.”
