“There was kind of a demand that everything be bureaucratized and centralized,” said Stephen A. Mitchell, a professor of Scandinavian and folklore who served as the Master of Eliot House from 1991 to 2000.

In a 1994 report, a committee composed of faculty and administrators clarified the role of the senior tutor as an administrator called on to enforce academic policy in a “uniform fashion” while reporting directly to the Dean of the College.

The report, whose recommendations were largely embraced by a vote of the faculty, elaborated a clear standard for the division of duties between senior tutors and Masters.

“The Master is responsible for the House as a whole and the community it creates; the [Senior] Tutor for the welfare of individual students resident within the House,” the report stated.

While not inherently unreasonable, this strict separation of roles could damage the relationship between Tutors and Masters when taken to extremes, Mitchell said, potentially contributing to a “perception that somehow House Masters were meant to bribe students with food and drink at receptions...and the intellectual, specific student welfare was the responsibility of the resident dean.”

According to former Leverett House Master John E. Dowling ’57, the creation of new deanships and offices outside of the Houses drove this trend.

“There’s no question that University Hall has taken a lot of the responsibility of running a House from the Masters and assumed it for University Hall, and I don’t think that’s a good thing frankly,” Dowling said.

However, this greater oversight has not always translated to close relationships between resident deans and top administrators, some said.

“Because of the nature of how this year has been, I just haven’t gotten to know [Dean of the College Evelynn M. Hammonds] as an academic in the way I would actually like to,” said Cabot House Resident Dean Emily W. Stokes-Rees, adding that her interactions with the dean in the past year have been limited primarily to formal Ad Board meetings.

But even in a more typical year, Stokes-Rees said, heavy workloads on both ends would likely make frequent contact impractical.

“Just in terms of the things she deals with in her day-to-day work, I think it would be unreasonable with the amount that she has to do and the amount that we have to do that we would be corresponding all the time,” Stokes-Rees mused, adding that she interacts much more frequently with some of Hammonds’s associate deans.

Of the 13 resident deans in upperclassman Houses, only Howell and Stokes-Rees agreed to be interviewed for this story. The other 11 declined or did not respond to requests for comment on this story.

A MORE DIVERSE SET OF CHARGES

Some point to the growing diversity of the student body to explain the changed role of the resident dean.

Efforts in the past few decades to broaden racial, gender, socioeconomic, and geographical representation at the College have brought to Harvard a more heterogeneous student body with a more varied background, Dingman said. These students require more attention to guide them through college life, he added, in turn demanding more time from administrators in the Houses.