William G. Perry Jr. of Watertown, former professor of education at the Graduate School of Education and founder and longtime director of the Bureau of Study Counsel, died Jan. 12 at Brigham and Women's Hospital. He was 84.

At the Bureau, Perry and his staff counseled and tutored undergraduates and graduate students seeking to improve their study habits and reading skills or to talk about personal issues. The Bureau is part of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS).

John B. Fox Jr., Secretary of the FAS, first met Perry as a freshman in 1955.

"Bill was very deaf, yet he made his reputation as a listener," Fox recalled. "He was as deeply knowledgeable about college students as any member of his generation, and he had an amazing capacity to communicate that knowledge to others.

"His creation and leadership of the Bureau of Study Counsel had a degree of magic about it, in that only Bill could have persuaded Harvard that it needed such a thing, and only Bill could have articulated what the Bureau did in such a way as to draw in the most timid freshman, and at the same time attract national attention for the Bureau's very unusual approach."

Perry was born in Paris and received the A.B. degree in 1935 and the A.M. degree in 1940 from Harvard. After teaching elsewhere for several years, he returned to Harvard in 1946 as lecturer on educational psychology at the Graduate School of Education, and he was appointed a "clinical" professor of education in 1965.

In 1946, Perry also became director of the Bureau of Supervisors, which he soon transformed into the Bureau of Study Counsel and led for 33 years. He also coauthored a translation of Homer's Iliad with Alston H. Chase in 1950.

Fox described as "path-breaking" Perry's book, Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years (1970), which was based on a decade-long study that Perry and his staff conducted on undergraduates. The researchers derived a set of nine stages through which students were seen to progress in their perceptions of the world.

Upon Perry's retirement as Bureau director in 1979, colleague Charles Whitlock praised Perry's ability to approach tasks with new energy and creative insight.

"His charisma comes from his ability to see things in a fresh way, long after the rest of us have labeled them and put them on a shelf," Whitlock was quoted in the Harvard Gazette. "Bill keeps seeing decision-making and sorrow and courage as though he'd discovered them for the first time."

Perry leaves his wife, Mary; a daughter, Lee Perry of Los Altos, Calif., and a stepson, Kevin Frank of Holderness, N.H.