By Emery Jenson, University of Wisconsin–Madison

Writing in 1990, Diana George and Nancy Grimm warned that “writing centers whose programs have expanded to meet university needs” would need to contend with the danger of being “co-opted by the larger system.”¹ Ten years later, at the turn of the century, Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford express a similar concern for how the “important scholarly and pedagogical work” of writing centers risks being devalued “as mere academic service” within the expanding structure of the University. ²

While the context in which these authors wrote was undeniably hopeful, bolstered by a flourishing of writing centers across the country, their anxieties regarding the role of writing centers in relation to changing university structures merits further consideration. This is especially true in view of the financial, administrative, and ideological restructuring of today’s higher education landscape. 

Despite their concerns, it’s unlikely that Ede, Lunsford, George, or Grimm could have foreseen the scope of what is often called the “crisis” of higher education today. Universities, fueled by what Beth Mintz calls a “neoliberal sensibility,” have dedicated themselves to marketability of educational programs, high return-on-investment, and evaluations of student populations under the rubric of “human capital.”³ Even though, as Leif Weatherby points out, “universities have become increasingly corporatized” over a long period of almost half a century, recent developments in higher education remain unprecedented.

In 2023 West Virginia University proposed cutting thirty degree programs entirely, targeting, among others, offerings in world languages and literatures.⁴ Later that year, a new provost at Gettysburg College would close the prestigious Gettysburg Review, seemingly oblivious to its reach and reputation as a literary magazine.⁵ And, by 2024, a staggering fifty-seven percent of Harvard graduates would go into finance, consulting, or technology.”⁶ While seemingly unrelated, each of these examples are symptomatic of “the larger system” of the University today, a system which prioritizes education as a private investment rather than a public good.⁷ How should we understand the position of writing centers amidst this sea change? Are the hopes and fears expressed by Ede and Lunsford, and George and Grimm about the devaluation and co-optation of writing centers still prescient today? 

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I want to make a small inroad towards answering these questions by evaluating the writing center in relation to a crucial component of the neoliberal university, what Beth Mintz calls the “student-as-customer approach to higher education.”⁸ The student-as-customer model follows from increasing public disinvestment from higher education, requiring universities to compete for tuition dollars by developing bloated student services and manufacturing prestige as a kind of “return on investment” for university degrees. 

As university investment in student services and administrative infrastructure spirals into unsustainability, students become the producer-consumers of the diploma qua commodity. This customer service model produces, according to Mintz, “larger classes, fewer program choices, more adjunct faculty, and enormous amounts of deferred maintenance.”⁹ It also produces student alienation. Increasingly pressured to extract economic value from their degrees, students become highly invested in navigating and standardizing their own assessment. Rather than critiquing the basis of their assessment, students often prioritize transparency and regularity in grading and evaluation. In other words, students become less interested in the content of their assessment than in the predictability, consistency, and enforcement of assessment protocols. 

In many ways this reinvestment is a smart move. With their education defined by their performance in a competitive marketplace, students become experts in producing a particular kind of value. While writing centers have done important work to understand how biased frameworks of assessment can discourage “emergent writers as they try to develop their personal relationships to writing,”¹⁰ we have yet to understand how students’ changing investment in assessment infrastructures is affecting the role of writing centers on university campuses. 

My own experience as an instructor is that writing center appointments can sometimes feel like conversations taking place over customer service helplines. Students present rubrics like warranties, and instructors help to ensure the guarantees of “success” provided therein. This is, of course, a cynical view. It’s important to note that I’ve watched countless students bloom authentically as writers and thinkers during my tenure at the University of Wisconsin–Madison Writing Center. At the same time, it would be disingenuous to say that I haven’t experienced the effects of the customer-service model of higher education in my work. This experience, moreover, goes beyond student attitudes towards assessment. 

The student-as-customer era of higher education has also seen an increased role of non-academic writing in writing centers. As Shaoxuan Tian observes, “recently we have seen more students from all class years use writing center sessions for pre-professional writing, from grant/fellowship applications to cover letters.”¹¹ Pre-professional writing, like academic writing, can provide valuable opportunities for learning and thinking with students. At the same time, it is emblematic of how writing functions within a university which is increasingly oriented towards professionalization and financialization. 

Both of these examples—the primacy of assessment and the ascendancy of professional writing—open a series of important questions: how can writing centers maintain a relationship to writing that foregrounds the production of knowledge and justice rather than economic capital? How can we relate to students not only on the level of assessment and professionalization, but on the level of their writerly practice? As writing centers continue to grow across campuses, it will be crucial to ask questions about how writing centers fit into the processes of production characteristic of the neoliberalization of the university. 

As universities continue to cut and underfund programs in the humanities, it is incumbent on writing centers to foreground their connection to theories of language, practices of writing, and ways of understanding endogenous to these newly marginalized areas of the academy. While the interdisciplinary framework of writing centers has allowed a certain agility regarding biased and limiting disciplinary norms, this kind of independence is also a risk: university writing may be cut from the unique contributions of its disciplinary roots, and writing centers may find themselves in a position of uncanny coherence with the neoliberal university, guaranteeing processes of value creation at the expense of their founding commitments to writing as a way of thinking and learning. In other words, writing centers risk the life of call centers, where teaching veers into trouble shooting and writing emerges as clear, contractual, and above all “content-neutral.” 

It is time we recognize George and Grimm’s risky future as our present reality. Against the danger of co-optation, the “writing” of “writing centers” must persist, not as mere communication, but as a scholarly, creative, human practice: as craft, as risk, and as responsibility. For students, instructors, staff, and administrators, the question of how we maintain our commitments to writing  is now in sharp focus. 

Works Cited

1. Diana George and Nancy Grimm, “Expanded Roles/Expanded Responsibilities: The Changing Nature of Writing Centers Today,” Writing Center Journal 11, no. 1 (January 1, 1990): 62. ↩︎
2. Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford, “Some Millennial Thoughts about the Future of Writing Centers,” Writing Center Journal 20, no. 2 (January 1, 2000): 35. ↩︎
3. Beth Mintz, “Neoliberalism and the Crisis in Higher Education: The Cost of Ideology,” The American Journal of Economics and Sociology 80, no. 1 (January 2021): 79–112. ↩︎
4. Leif Weatherby, “What Just Happened at West Virginia University Should Worry All of Us,” New York Times (August 2023). ↩︎
5. “Why Is Gettysburg College Giving Up on ‘The Gettysburg Review’?” The Chronicle of Higher Education (October, 2023). ↩︎
6. Leif Weatherby, “The Misguided Idea that Universities are Left-Wing Hotbeds,” The Boston Globe (January 2024). ↩︎
7. Beth Mintz, “Neoliberalism and the Crisis in Higher Education: The Cost of Ideology,” The American Journal of Economics and Sociology 80, no. 1 (January 2021): 79–112. ↩︎
8. Mintz, “Neoliberalism and the Crisis in Higher Education: The Cost of Ideology,” 80. ↩︎
9. Mintz, “Neoliberalism and the Crisis in Higher Education: The Cost of Ideology,” 93. ↩︎
10. Shaoxuan Tian, “Not Quite Your Writing Clinic: Experimentations with a Caring Writing Curriculum amid ‘the Liberal Education Crisis,’” Another Word (March 2024). ↩︎
11. Tian, “Not Quite Your Writing Clinic: Experimentations with a Caring Writing Curriculum amid ‘the Liberal Education Crisis.’” ↩︎