Harvard College plans to change the title of its heads of residential housing from “house master,” the traditional term, to a new term that will better reflect “the 21st-century needs of residential student life,” according to a letter to students from the college dean, Rakesh Khurana.

The change, announced in an email sent out Tuesday, comes after long discussion over whether the term “master” has connotations of slavery, and in the wake of recent protests at Harvard and other colleges over racial bias, from the real to the symbolic.

The term master has been one of the first such symbols to fall. Universities have expressed more reservations about, for instance, changing the names of buildings named after historic figures, like Woodrow Wilson at Princeton.

The email was signed by the current masters of Harvard’s undergraduate houses. Dr. Khurana said the house masters had “unanimously expressed a desire to change their title.”