University Provost Steven E. Hyman, who convened the task force with Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71, wrote in an e-mail that changes to the Bureau are ongoing and will ultimately make the Bureau more accessible.

“The reorganization enables us to make sure that, wherever students first go for help, they will be able to access easily and smoothly the assistance best suited to their needs,” Hyman wrote. “The Bureau and MHS are being brought together—each continuing to provide its unique services to students, but communicating and working together more effectively under a shared umbrella and a new leader.”

Barreira noted that the Bureau is reporting to Rosenthal only temporarily, until a University mental health leader—an administrator who will oversee all clinical, residential and academic facets of mental health care—is appointed. The University has begun searching to fill the position, and administrators say they hope to have a mental health leader in place by September.

“Part of what seems to get lost in this discussion is that both Mental Health Services at UHS and the Bureau are both reporting to a new person,” Barreira said. “It always sounds like the Bureau is suddenly under UHS. But the task force was careful...there was never any intention or discussion or anything in interim recommendations that suggested the Bureau was going to lose its unique role.”

The letter echoed the task force’s worry about the Bureau’s increasing role in the realm of clinical services.

“We share the concern of the Task Force that the Bureau has fallen into doing active clinical care with severely troubled students,” the letter said. “We want the opportunity to stop providing clinical care and to reaffirm our original mission, which is counseling Harvard students in the service of their learning, growth, and normal development.”

The letter also expressed the counselors’ concerns that the Bureau has not adequately consulted its staff in reaching its conclusions.

“We are concerned that the Task Force has not heard, or perhaps has not fully considered, the case for the University’s maintaining the distinct role of a counseling center,” the letter said.

In the letter, the counselors asked the task force to consider alternatives to integration, and that they be consulted in that process.

But Barreira said that soon after the letter was sent, he met with its signers to address its concerns and explain the task force’s rationale for the Bureau’s new reporting relationship with UHS.

“I think they still wished that the Bureau would remain in a reporting relationship to the dean, but they also understood that that wasn’t going to happen,” Barreira said.

Rosenthal also met individually with most of the counselors and said he attempted to “allay any anxieties” they had about the change. He said that Weylman is the only counselor with whom he has not yet met.

“We are all very anxious to keep their services going, without any change in the access of students to the Bureau,” Rosenthal said.

Weylman wrote that she continued to be concerned about what she said has been an insufficient response to the Bureau counselors’ critiques of the reorganization.

“My leaving is a direct response to the process to which the Bureau has been subjected over the past several years, a process characterized by a profound and consistent lack of sensitivity and wisdom surrounding the choice to move the Bureau from the educational auspices of [the Faculty of Arts and Sciences] into the clinical structure of UHS,” she wrote. “For the past two years, I have witnessed the concerns of my colleagues, all of whom feel passionately about their work with Harvard students, go deliberately and consistently unheeded. This has been profoundly disheartening.”