I appreciated Sam Gorovitz’s call last week for ‘serious inquiry and discussion on campus’ regarding the costs of Chancellor Nancy ‘Cantor’s social agenda.’ I, too, consider the tradeoffs of pursing such ambitious goals at a large, elite research university as ours. In the spirit of that discussion, then, I would like to address one of the more or less random examples Gorovitz provided about said costs, namely that ‘our underfunded Writing Center fails to help many of the students sent to it.’

I had the pleasure of directing our Writing Center for six years; in that time we conversed with thousands of students sketching, drafting and revising a variety of writing projects: from their first essays in WRT 105 to their final theses and dissertations in their respective disciplines. These students come from a host of diverse cultural and geographic locations and seek our professional advice as they navigate the complexities of academic writing. As part of my role in leading the center, I worked with the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment to evaluate the experiences of new and returning students when it came to both their satisfaction with our services and our learning outcomes. What we found was interesting.

In 2009-10, for instance, OIRA surveyed more than 200 repeat visitors (those students who visited with a consultant three or more times). Those students reported high levels (i.e. more than three on a four-point scale) of improvement on such skills as organizing ideas, focusing their writing, understanding an instructor’s writing assignment and critiquing their own writing. They reported having a better understanding of the writing process, being able to talk more fluently about writing, improving their confidence and incorporating talk into their normal writing process. Finally, in terms of whether students would use our services in the future or recommend the Writing Center to others, the mean scores were consistently higher than 4.3 (on a five-point scale).

Although the sample size wasn’t enormous, statistically speaking, it is difficult to get higher scores than these. This begs the question: by what measure is Gorovitz judging failure? What is his definition of help? Perhaps his understanding of our center is limited to anecdotal evidence. Or perhaps when he sends his students to the Writing Center, they don’t actually go.

Gorovitz is right, however, when he says the Writing Center is underfunded. If our OIRA assessment told us one thing, it was that our students wanted more time to talk about their writing. And as the center’s weekly schedule can attest, it is often booked days in advance, especially during peak times of the semester.

I’m all for supporting ‘serious inquiry’ as we re-evaluate our priorities at SU, but like most students and faculty on this campus, I assume that means producing evidence for claims, especially when those claims seek to dismiss one of the best student services available at SU.

Jason Luther

Doctoral Student

Composition and Cultural Rhetoric

 

Published on November 15, 2011 at 12:00 pm