Christina Murphy and Joe Law

In 1984, Stephen M. North "The Idea of a Writing Center" was the first essay devoted exclusively to writing centers to be published in College English and instantly became a manifesto of writing center identity and politics, signaling a new interpretation of the role of the writing center within the academy and within academic politics. In the intervening fifteen years, North's polemical essay has become the single most important and the most quoted essay in writing center scholarship. The essay has had great appeal for writing center scholars both because it asserts the primacy of a student-centered pedagogy and because it chastises English department faculty for possessing a "second layer of ignorance" and "a false sense of knowing" about what the role of a writing center is within the department and the academy (433). As a result of this long tradition of ignorance and indifference, English department faculty have practiced exclusionary and marginalizing politics with regard to writing centers and writing center professionals. The movement of writing centers into the academy--which North dates to around 1930--represents an uneasy alliance of differing traditions and pedagogies that has generated the ongoing rift between writing centers and English departments. Not surprisingly, given the critical tone North's essay takes when its focus turns to the negative view English faculty hold of writing centers, North's conclusion is to assert that writing centers represent their own reason for being because their pedagogical tradition of tutoring and of apprenticeship learning has stood the test of time since Socrates as a "continuous dialectic" that has been centered outside of the academy and in the public realm--what North calls the "marketplace" tradition of Socrates and Athens (446). North argues that writing centers are not to be viewed as an ancillary service: "We are not here to serve, supplement, back up, complement, reinforce, or otherwise be defined by any external curriculum. We are here to talk to writers" (440). His essay, North asserts, is a "declaration of independence" that may sound to some "more like a declaration of war" (441).

While it would be impossible to overestimate the influence of North's essay on the ways writing centers have subsequently described themselves and carried out their work, it is also important to place the essay in its time period and to examine its assumptions in terms of what precedes and what follows in the history of composition studies. It should be noted that, at the time of North's essay, English departments were largely literature departments, and so the rift North discusses was even wider in theory, practice, and emphasis. This was a time in which literature was regarded as an intellectual and humanistic tradition while writing instruction was viewed as a nontheoretical, remedial effort to instill in students the basics of literacy education. It was also a time that gave rise to the "lingering snobbery" that John Schilb describes as "comp-bashing" (341). Thus, it is not surprising, given this history and the negative attitudes literature faculty traditionally have held toward composition studies, that North's essay is both a call for understanding and a call for separation. Nor is it surprising that North's essay replicates many of the ideas presented in a famous essay by Maxine Hairston published in 1982--"The Winds of Change: Thomas Kuhn and the Revolution in the Teaching of Writing." Hairston's major premise was to describe the shift from product-centered to process-centered writing instruction as a "paradigm shift" on the order of the Copernican revolution in science. Sharply distinguishing the work of composition and rhetoric specialists from the work of their predecessors, Hairston describes the new approach in these terms: "We cannot teach students to write by looking only at what they have written. We must also understand how that product came into being, and why it assumed the form that it did. We have to understand what goes on during the act of writing if we want to affect its outcome" (84).

One of Hairston's purposes seems to have been to codify this new model so that it might be passed along as the new mode of instruction, as her final sentence suggests. There she identifies the challenge to "today's community of composition and rhetoric scholars: to refine the new paradigm for teaching composition writing for the nonspecialists who do most of the composition teaching in our colleges and universities" (88). A decade later, from a much more defensive position, Hairston again summarized what she saw as progress in the new field of composition and rhetoric and its concomitant new paradigm for teaching that was "focused on process and on writing as a way of learning." Citing her 1985 address as chair of CCCC, she reminded readers of her earlier call for "psychological and intellectual independence" from English departments run by literary critics, claiming compositionists could not develop their potential and "become fully autonomous scholars and teachers" under those conditions. She also repeated her insistence "that writing courses must not be viewed as service courses. Writing courses, especially required freshman courses, should not be for anything or about anything other than writing itself, and how one uses it to learn and think and communicate" ( "Diversity"179). That her attitude toward independence remained unchanged can be seen in her professed "first response" to the politicized classroom of the 1990s: "You see what happens when we allow writing programs to be run by English departments?" ( "Diversity"183).

Hairston and North represent two writers of the same mind in two important respects--their emphasis on the writer as an individual to be improved through writing instruction and their tendency toward separatist rhetoric. Hairston's and North's essays also manifest the intellectual contours of the process movement that dominated composition studies and writing center practice in the 1980s. In "How the Writing Process Was Born--and Other Conversion Narratives," Lad Tobin claims that the process movement in the 1980s represented a critique of traditional teaching as well as an emphasis on "the [writing] process, student choice and voice, revision, selfexpression" (5). Tobin is also straightforward in asserting that his readers understand "how miserably traditional writing instruction had failed and how desperately the times cried out for change-and for heroes" (3). He goes on to assert:

In the old days, say the mid-80s, those of us who supported writing process pedagogy could tell stories about bad writing classes and bad writing teachers and then prescribe an antidote: change everything. And while we advocated such radical change, we were comforted by the knowledge that we occupied the higher moral ground. After all, we were speaking up against rigidity, legalism, authoritarianism, fuddy-duddyism. We were speaking up for students, freedom, innovation, creativity, and change. As long as we could characterize our opponentsas old fogeys, too tired to change, we were in a pretty comfortable position. (5)

Tobin's essay, written in 1994, affords him a fourteen-year perspective from which to view the writing process movement, and he is quick to assert that, from the perspective of many movements that have followed--including social constructionism and cultural studies-- the writing process founders are seen as terribly declasse and outmoded: they are entrepreneurial (for emphasizing the commodification of the individual writer's assets); evangelical (for refusing to provide hard evidence, definitions, research); bourgeois (for treating students as writers or artists or free agents rather than as workers, citizens, and culturally situated beings); and, worst of all for an academic, naive (for not knowing there is no authentic voice, no single-authored text, no self). (6-7)

As Tobin suggests, the intervening years since the zenith of the process movement in the 1980s offer an opportunity to evaluate the central tenets of the process movement and its effects upon composition studies. We would also extend this analysis to writing centers by drawing upon the concepts developed in Tobin's essay and in Hairston's and North's as well. Our purpose is to examine how well the premises and implications of the process movement have served writing centers and the individual writers they work with. Our purpose is also to examine the legacy the process movement has created for the writing center discipline through subsequent philosophies that have influenced the intellectual and practical contours of writing center work within the post-process academy.

For our analysis, the most important ideas we draw from the process movement are these: the emphasis upon the individual writer and his or her creative potential for self-realization; the separatist rhetoric of the process movement that often serves to divide literature, composition studies, and writing centers; the "evangelical" character of the process movement as a revolutionary educational philosophy; and the tendency of the process movement to write the history of composition studies "primarily through the stories we tell" ( Tobin1).

In writing center scholarship, it is easy to see a direct and ongoing connection between the emphasis upon the individual writer and the "evangelical" character of many essays that focus upon writing center practice. One concept underlies the other; that is, if writing centers do embody the revolutionary and the "evangelical" character of the process movement, then the revolution and the evangelism focus upon the individual student as a victim to be saved from an oppressive and unempathic academic system bent on uniformity. The price of uniformity is the stifling of the student's "voice"--a term that often goes undefined but that is as central to process pedagogy as it is to the pedagogies of social constructionism and cultural studies.

The implications of Tobin's assessment are complex for writing center pedagogy and scholarship. For example, although the emphasis on the individual student would seem to be a good thing, the published scholarship has tended to center on the affective level of the writing center's work rather than on its effectiveness as pedagogy. The result is an extensive exploration of the "ethics" of tutoring rather than a sustained analytical exploration of tutoring as an effective pedagogy--one that would draw upon a broad, research-based analysis of modes of cognition and of theories of learning and that would use controlled, empirical studies to assess data. As it is, much of the research and scholarship on writing centers stays on a highly localized and highly emotionalized level. Writing center theorists and practitioners tell narratives of individual students who have been ignored, stifled, or otherwise damaged by traditional academics and yet have prospered in the empathic environment of the writing center. Such powerful tales of redemption and salvation reinforce the "evangelical" character of much writing center scholarship. For example, Nancy Maloney Grimm CCC essay, "Rearticulating the Work of the Writing Center," focuses upon narratives about and discussions of individual students who have been disadvantaged by their background and are underprepared to cope with the varied demands of academic life. Grimm argues that writing center specialists should use what they learn about the injurious effects of educational discourse to spark political and pedagogical changes that benefit disadvantaged students. As Grimm states:

In this essay, I want to rearticulate the relationship of the writing center to the institution by attempting to address the gap between theorizing about difference in higher education and working with differences in the writing center. I want to situate writing center work with the democratic desire to understand and negotiate difference, to work within heterogeneity rather than to manage to eliminate it. (524)

The "evangelical" approach of Grimm's essay is apparent in its rhetoric and purpose, and the essay is grounded in individual narratives of student failures in academic mainstreaming and successes in the more democratic and empathic environment of a correctly positioned and correctly principled writing center. The political agenda Grimm endorses is one of opposition to "the hierarchical structure of higher education" (529) and a concomitant focus upon counterhegemony in both the structure and the purpose of writing center practice. Grimm's essay is extensively researched and draws upon scholarship from multiple fields, including literacy theory, feminist theory, literary criticism, and social psychology. In an interesting twist, though, the essay begins with the assertion that [w]riting center people often gravitate toward practical solutions to these ongoing problems [of marginalization]. They urge one another to get control of their budgets and get out from under the English department. They advise one another to look for the university's five-year plan and make the writing center indispensable by matching its philosophy to that plan. In spite of these practical solutions and perhaps because of them, writing centers on most campuses remain in subordinate service positions. They are marked by social notions of what women provide--refuge, nurturance, emotional support, personal guidance. (524)

Yet despite Grimm's awareness of and reservations about the "social notions" inherent in academics' views of the work of the writing center, Grimm grounds her own essay in the central metaphor of family therapy--a philosophy she uses to emphasize the empathic, emotive, and ultimately redemptive power that can be actualized by radical writing centers that oppose the oppressions of mainstream educational hierarchies and offer refuge, comfort, and hope to students who do not conform to and who are not valued by these hierarchies.

There is an additional historical irony to Grimm's essay that is indicative of what we have deemed "the dubious legacy" of the process movement. The opening of Grimm's 1996 essay echoes many of the same concerns voiced by North in 1984. Like North, Grimm begins her essay by describing the unsatisfactory conditions of writing center work:

Not only are writing center voices infrequently heard in composition scholarship but writing centers also occupy contested positions on their respective campuses. The stories shared among writing center people ring with familiar themes--faculty suspicion about what happens in writing centers, refusal to grant departmental voting rights to writing center professional staff, faculty dismay about the condition of papers that "went through" the writing center (the laundry metaphor), exploitation of part-timers, miffed reactions to undergraduate writing tutors who ask questions about teaching practices, confusion about the status/role of writing center directors. (523)

Grimm's introduction restates the ambiguous and conflicted relationship writing centers and writing center professionals share with English departments that North noted with disappointment and frustration in 1984--this despite the fact that, in the intervening years between North and Grimm, writing centers have come to occupy a central role in the life of the academy with writing centers now on more than 90 percent of the campuses in America ( Grimm523).

Grimm finds it paradoxical and troubling that, despite the long history, diversity, and high numbers of writing centers on American campuses, published scholarship on writing centers generally has not appeared in the major journals and presses but has been confined to professional journals and national and regional conferences within the writing center community (523). Grimm offers one explanation for why this might be so: "The work of the writing center is not integrated theoretically or structurally within the intellectual work of the university. Writing centers are the handmaidens of autonomous literacy--a value-free, culturally neutral notion of literacy--which although extensively challenged theoretically is still strongly at work in the academy" (524). We would like to offer two other explanations, explanations that we trace, once more, to the dubious legacy of the process movement.

For all the apparent newness and contemporaneity of Grimm's essay, which draws upon many postmodern cultural theorists and which demonstrates a broad knowledge of cultural theory, its premises are not far removed from North's process-oriented convictions in his earlier essay. For example, North relies upon the process movement's belief in the value of each student's individual search for self-expression and self-realization to argue that writing centers are safe spaces for students. In writing centers, students find the nurture, support, and encouragement they generally do not find in composition classrooms. The lingering idea that resurfaces in Grimm's essay is that writing centers do nurture by functioning as havens or support centers for students displaced and devalued by traditional mainstream approaches to education. For all the truth and for all the good that may reside in this assertion, nurturing is a difficult concept to integrate "theoretically or structurally within the intellectual work of the university"--as Grimm phrases it (524). Thus, the work of the writing center and the rationale for its success are often best communicated through narratives--the success stories of individual students and of individual writing centers. The narratives manifest the evangelical character of the process movement, "refusing to provide hard evidence, definitions, research" ( Tobin7).

The fact that the history of writing centers, like that of composition studies during the era of process pedagogy, has been "written primarily through the stories we tell" ( Tobin1) points to another vestige of the process movement. Kevin Davis, among other theorists, has noted the difficulty of connecting vignettes, personal histories, and local narratives to theory and to professional direction for an academic discipline in "Life Outside the Boundary: History and Direction in the Writing Center" ( 1995). Despite this concern, the writing center field continues largely to write its history "primarily through the stories we tell." This tendency also extends to descriptions of writing centers in their setup, operations, institutional relations, and successes or failures. Classic examples of this approach are Joyce Kinkead and Jeanette Harris edited collection Writing Centers in Context: Twelve Case Studies ( NCTE 1993), and Weaving Knowledge Together: Writing Centers and Collaboration, edited by Carol Peterson Haviland , Maria Notarangelo, Lene Whitley-Putz, and Thia Wolf ( NWCA Press 1998). Both texts are collections of narrative essays that focus largely on the personal identities and institutional contexts of individual writing centers. The essays are long on local color, but generally short on a broad or persuasive theoretical framework in which to ground narrative assumptions and conclusions. By grounding their work in narratives, writing center professionals often find it hard to make the case that anecdotal evidence even constitutes evidence, let alone theory. Such a focus does little to address the concerns many academics have about whether there even is a theoretical basis to writing center work and scholarship. The difficulty of integrating the personal and the theoretical in writing center scholarship is one aspect, we contend, of the dubious legacy of the process movement and definitely an area that post-process writing center scholars will need to continue to address.

We do not want to argue, though, that writing center scholarship should simply abandon this portion of the process movement's legacy. It is impossible to deny that many truths reside in and are only found in the personal, and this positive aspect of the influence of the process movement continues to find validation in the writing center discipline. Indeed, the fact that the truths found in the personal may not fit the traditional modes through which scholarship is communicated and rewarded in academics may say more about the need for expanding our sense of the purpose of those traditional modes than it may say about the value of personal truths themselves. Lisa Ede, for example, in "Reading the Writing Process" raises the issue of "the relationship between theory and practice as it has been both textually and materially inscribed in our field" (31). As Ede contends:

Our assumption that theory should inform and guide practice, for instance, reflects the western tradition's positivistic claims for reason. These claims situate the "man ofreason" above and beyond the buzzing and blooming multiplicity of everyday life. Like the patriarchal father, the man of reason in his abstract and decontextualized wisdom sees the unvarying and universal "laws" that women and children (and teachers), caught up as they are in the daily and the contingent--or so the familiar western narrativeof reason goes--cannot see. So powerful has this conception of reason (and of theory) been that only now are we beginning to see through its claims to question the rejection of the particular and the situated--of, for instance, the knowledge required to interpret and act upon the "teachable moment"--upon which it depends. (37)

The central principles of Ede's argument actually can be found in Aristotle's discussion in the Nicomachean Ethics of the three categories of knowledge: theoretical (episteme), productive (techne), and practical (phronesis). While episteme or theoretical knowledge deals with necessary truths that cannot be otherwise than they are (151; 6.3.1139b), both phronesis and techne treat "what admits of being otherwise" (152; 6.5.1140a). For Aristotle, ethics falls under the domain of phronesis or practical knowledge, which is "a state of grasping the truth, involving reason, concerned with action about what is good or bad for a human being" (154; 6.5.1140b). We would contend that both Ede and Grimm--and North as well--are arguing for an appreciation of phronetic knowledge in academics, particularly as that knowledge is manifested in composition studies and in writing centers. For North and Ede, the process movement brings this truth home and makes them wish to expand definitions and appreciations of academic knowledge and to persuade their academic colleagues of this value of phrenetic knowledge in relation to theoretical knowledge. For Grimm, the same concepts are found in social constructionism and cultural studies, rather than in the process movement, but the issues remain the same--that there is a domain of knowledge that is practical, that is centered in everyday academic realities, and that embodies ethical choices and implications for real students with real stories to tell that have as much--even more--validity than the hypothetical and theoretical constructs of traditional academic scholarship.

Unfortunately, in writing center scholarship, the argument for an appreciation of phronetic knowledge is often made within a context that ignores, or seeks to ignore, institutional politics. Part of this difficulty resides in naive views of the difference between an intellectual idea and an academic movement--and even more naive assumptions about how ideas and movements play out within institutional settings. It is interesting, for example, that North titled his essay "The Idea of a Writing Center" and emphasized and favored the idea or the ideal over the realities of his own unsympathetic and condemnatory institutional setting. This is an important point, for as George Dennis O'Brien writes in All the Essential Half--Truths about Higher Education, "The university is not an idea; it is an institution" (3). To forget this distinction can have important consequences:

discussions of higher education are anywhere from misplaced to mistaken because they address the idea of higher education, not the institution of higher education. . . . Failure to address institution is subtly distorting. An idea that has absolute validity in its own right becomes subtly changed when it becomes institutionalized. . . . an absolute truth becomes a half-truth. (xviii-xix)

Part of the legacy of the process movement for writing centers has been a tendency, in the midst of revolutionary and anti-institutional fervor, to advocate ideas without fully appreciating the significance of the institutions in which such ideas are to be implemented. The "evangelical" character that defines the process movement, according to Tobin and others, has also shaped the writing center movement. Writing center practitioners who believe their role is to offer students an alternative to the oppression and pigeonholing of mainstream academics will resist being identified with or shaped by the mainstream academy itself, for, if this occurs, the identity of the writing center as a revolutionary and antiestablishment space is lost. As a consequence, writing center professionals often advocate a maverick view of the writing center and argue that, to be faithful to the writing center legacy, they must maintain their identities as "renegades, outsiders, boundary dwellers, subversives" ( Davis7).

If that identity as an outlander is lost, often the result is an essay devoted to grief for the loss and nostalgia for the good old days--as "Erika and the Fish Lamps: Writing and Reading the Local Scene" demonstrates. This essay, included in Weaving Knowledge Together, begins with the authors asking "what a reading of our physical place might tell us about who we were or who we thought we were" ( Connolly, DeJarlais, Gillam, and Micciche15). What they discover, via fish lamps and bold posters set up in the writing center by peer tutors, is that their writing center first conceptualizes itself as a "borderland"--a place that stands in opposition to the conformity and ordinariness of the rest of the academic enterprise. What they later learn is that, despite their desire to serve "as the natural location for subversive, counterhegemonic literacy work" (21), their writing center exists via an institutional mandate and budget. When that mandate changes, the writing center changes also. While the authors may abhor having to trade fish lamps for a relatively sterile location and appearance in a typical academic building, that is the reality. While nostalgia for the past and grief over a changing present are valid personal responses, they do not change the realities of academic funding and program design--especially in a world and at a time when philosophical and financial support for education is declining.

Writing centers do change--and must adapt--in response to changes in institutional contexts. While this may be a disappointing fact of life for some, it is also a confirming fact of life for others. The success and commitment of the "Fish Lamps" writing center have prepared the way for a new writing center and staff to take their place in a high-tech location committed to serving the university's composition program. This is not so much a loss as a transition; the loss belongs to those who would prefer a "borderland" writing center, but the loss may not be to the students who will use the new center, the composition program that will benefit, or the literacy education that will occur there in different ways from the original startup idea of the "Fish Lamps" writing center.

Perhaps this movement of the "Fish Lamps" writing center away from the borderlands of the academy toward its center should be seen as emblematic of the direction of educational reform in general. Reviewing Thomas P. Miller's study of the development of English as a college subject, Schilb finds in Miller's work a useful reminder that "changes in educational practices often start at the periphery or from below" (342). Not to see this larger pattern and to react only with nostalgia for the passing of the "borderland" writing center is, in O'Brien's terms, to ignore the institution in which an idea is to be realized. In this context, warnings like those in Terrance Riley "The Unpromising Future of Writing Centers"--an essay arguing that the growing professionalization of writing center work jeopardizes the ability of writing centers to effect change in academe--appear misguided in the same way. Likewise, for writing center professionals to continue to present themselves as "renegades, outsiders, boundary dwellers, [and] subversives" ( Davis7) can only alienate the administrators who make crucial decisions about the writing center and confirm their tendency to make those decisions without consulting writing center personnel. This is an extremely complicated and dangerous pose in this present era of limited budgets and ofp accountability to administrators, state legislatures, and the public at large, for, as O'Brien states, "When the coffers close, who will decide on the intellectual survivors?" (xvi). As far as writing center and composition professionals are concerned, the issue can be restated in this manner: if the public in general--and legislators in particular--continue to perceive problems in higher education, questions of who owns the text will become irrelevant.