College and university bureaucracies tend to have a strong mimetic streak. Institutions with lower academic rankings often emulate the initiatives and priorities of their higher-ranked peers. Harvard is the apex predator in America’s higher-ed ecosystem, and it has substantial power to influence what counts as essential to a good education. The decisions that Harvard makes create a permission structure for other institutions to follow suit—after all, if one of the most venerable schools in the country doesn’t need a writing center in order to be “elite,” why would a public university, or a regional liberal-arts college, or a community college need one?
~ Tyler Austin Harper via The Atlantic

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Last year, I traveled to Montana State University for a week as a writer-in-residence. There, I met with students and faculty to talk about journalism and creative nonfiction. The highlight of the trip was a Q&A session with the university’s writing-center tutors. I left with an ultramarine MSU Writing Center T-shirt and an overwhelming admiration for the students and staff who were doing their best, with limited resources and watery office coffee, to make a case for going to the center rather than using the bots.
~ Tyler Austin Harper via The Atlantic

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When an institution begins subjecting something so fundamental to a college education as writing to the cold logic of spreadsheets and bureaucratic streamlining, it has conceded quite a lot already. This concession may ultimately open the door for administrators of the future to argue that writing instruction should be turned over to robots for the sake of savings and efficiency.
~ Tyler Austin Harper via The Atlantic

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