Semuels' Departure a Loss for Student Health

To the editors:

As a former chair of the Mental Health Awareness and Advocacy Group, I was seriously dismayed this past summer when assistant provost Marsha H. Semuels told me that the University had eliminated her position (News, “Group Riled By Assistant Provost’s Firing,” Oct. 24).

In four years at Harvard, I never met a single other faculty or staff member who cared more about students, both as a population in need of mental health services and as regular individuals, than Semuels does. Though she may have lost her job, ultimately the biggest loss here is Harvard’s. Not only has the University disposed of an incredible asset, one who perhaps paid with her job for the student-friendly mental health and sexual assault policy reforms she pushed through past an inflexible administration, but they also did away with the position that allowed her to accomplish so much.

Downplaying Semuels’ dismissal by saying that several other people will take over her job responsibilities entirely misses the point, which is that she was able to perform so effectively because all mental health projects and initiatives were concentrated under her. Standing outside of University Health Services, the Bureau of Study Counsel, the Freshman Dean’s Office, the Office of the Dean of Harvard College, and all of the graduate schools, Semuels could focus an eye on the entire mental health picture at Harvard and intervene where necessary. With her former duties now parcelled out across the administration, no one has the vantage point that she did. And Harvard, of course, doesn’t have the committed champion for students’ welfare that it had in Marsha Semuels.

Sarah J. Ramer ’03

Oct. 26, 2003

The writer was co-chair of the Harvard Mental Health Awareness and Advocacy Group in 2002.