In Defense of the Harvard College Writing Center

To Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76, Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra, Harvard College Dean David J. Deming, and Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh:

As current and former Harvard College Writing Center tutors, we write to condemn the dissolution of the Writing Center as an independent entity and the laying off of its director, Jane Rosenzweig. The decision recklessly dismantles a crucial undergraduate-serving institution and reflects a troubling disregard for written and verbal communication, fundamental aspects of a liberal arts education.

The Writing Center is a vital resource for students of the College. Writing Center tutors conduct hundreds of one-on-one conferences each semester. Tutors meet with writers at every stage of their undergraduate education: in our time at the Writing Center, we worked with seniors drafting theses that went on to win the Hoopes Prize, as well as first-years tackling their first Expos exercise. Regardless of level, every tutoring session is built around the understanding that writing is thinking.

The task of the tutor goes well beyond proofreading or even critiquing a piece of writing; the tutor’s purpose is to engage in a conversation that helps a writer hone their ideas in order to better express them on the page. These conversations are exercises in reciprocal education.

Every writer must teach their tutor about their subject, while every tutor must elicit from the writer more concise, coherent, and convincing articulations of their ideas. Many of us used the Writing Center ourselves — believing, as many others do, that there is no comparable venue for peer-to-peer learning at the College.

For over 20 years, Jane Rosenzweig has been the source of the Writing Center’s success. She has been responsible for the rigorous training of generations of undergraduate tutors, a process of dialogue and reflection that begins the moment a tutor is hired at the Writing Center and continues through to graduation. For the past two decades, the Writing Center has employed tutors from diverse backgrounds, whose studies range broadly across the disciplines represented at the College.

As alumni, we benefited immensely from Jane’s mentorship. Regardless of our subsequent career path — in medicine, politics, journalism, education, or the law, among others — we all learned some of the foundational lessons in our craft from Jane.

Thanks to Jane’s leadership, we not only came together in service of shared goals but found new confidence in our capacities to collaborate, innovate, and succeed. The loss of her leadership and vision will have a deleterious impact on both writing tutors and the broader undergraduate community they serve.

It is particularly dismaying to see Harvard deprioritize writing and hamstring a crucial resource for undergraduate learning at a moment of profound change across higher education.

The widespread use of artificial intelligence poses challenges to teaching and learning across disciplines. Few people at Harvard have spent more time thinking critically and productively about the role of generative AI in the college classroom than Jane Rosenzweig, and few people are better equipped to train the next generation of writers and teachers in how to engage meaningfully with these tools without sacrificing academic excellence.

The Writing Center, under Jane’s directorship, has always emphasized the interrelation of writing, speaking, and thinking. Regardless of technical change and administrative restructuring, these fundamental skills remain central to Harvard College’s stated commitment to “the transformative power of a liberal arts and sciences education.” Closing the Writing Center and removing its leadership now sends a disturbing signal about how seriously Harvard actually takes that mission.

Rivka Brod Hyland ’16, Spencer A. Strub ’09, and Nicole West Bassoff ’16 are former Harvard College Writing Center tutors.

A full list of the signatories to this open letter can be found here.