A special crisis is gripping higher education. In a recent Lumina-Gallup survey of almost 4,000 college students, more than half reported using AI to help with coursework, even when its use had been explicitly prohibited.
We can fairly assume, too, that these survey takers are underreporting. On the ground, in college classrooms, the cheating feels almost endemic. AI use is poisoning assignments and exams
and longstanding beliefs in honor codes.Nor is such cheating simply a moral problem; at scale, it becomes a learning problem. Research shows that cognitive offloading to AI significantly erodes crucial critical-thinking skills. When students don’t think for themselves, using their own judgment as they write, read and comb through research, they deny
themselves the chance to internalize new knowledge and assimilate new practices.
Such AI-outsourcing has also engendered a serious teaching problem. Most faculty know the benefits of student writing are real; many nonetheless drastically shrink their writing assignments, if they still assign writing at all. If tides of cheating are on the rise, it can seem only right to assume that the only student work that counts is what faculty can personally surveil. Timed, in-class, blue-book writing is back. Long-form essays, produced over days and multiple drafts, appear to be bound for extinction.
Harvard moves in the wrong direction
In the face of such a crisis, Harvard College, this summer, made a terrible decision: not only to fire its writing center director, but to disband its writing center as a freestanding unit. Such a move signals the diminished esteem with which Harvard holds both student writing and students’ writing development. It also sets a dangerous precedent for other institutions of higher learning, for whom the college serves as a national thought leader and example.
Institutions close down writing centers at their own peril. Writing centers are, after all, the one unit on college campuses designed for the express and single purpose of supporting all student writers. In this, they manifest an institution’s belief that writing is a core feature of a college education, and that students working steadily to develop their writing, no matter their course of study, is a crucial means of learning. Upholding such a belief has never been as important as it is now. Indeed, writing centers stand as one of the last remaining bulwarks against the outsourcing temptations that GenAI has so recklessly released.
Writing centers are modest places, yes, staffed mostly by trained student tutors and remarkably inexpensive to run, requiring little more than some chairs and desks where students can sit and work together. But this modesty is also its superpower: It keeps student writing human-sized, honed in on individuals and details, and resolutely learning-focused.
When student consultants conference with writers, they read, write, and puzzle together over the problems and triumphs that make the act of writing so potent: such a profound, difficult, and revelatory experience. These sessions offer the real motivation, commiseration and guidance that students need to keep writing, and to recognize their own developing powers.
Crucially, writing centers also manifest − for students and faculty alike − an institution’s continuing faith that humans and students are better readers, writers, learners, tutors and interlocutors than one of the many black-box platforms popping up on so many students’ laptop screens.
Writing is supposed to be difficult
For where AI touts efficiency over quality control, writing centers know that, when it comes to learning, deceleration is usually a better tack. And where AI short-circuits process, writing center sessions spotlight process. Writing research has long shown that the work of writing − and writing well − is frequently slow, messy and recursive. Often, as the stakes go up, so, too, does the writer’s struggle. These struggles are especially true for students working in new disciplines and genres, and for new tasks and readers.
Writers learn far better through writing engagements that afford them not less, but more − more time, more resources, and more individualized attention from trusting and patient readers.
What accomplished writers know, and what the consultants at my writing center work to help writers to realize, is that we learn by writing, writing some more, and then talking about what we write. We learn by seeing what we write sometimes flourish and sometimes fail. We learn to write by fiddling with old and new words, by experimenting with just how to put an idea. We learn to write when we see, to our amazement and frustration, how our writing can make different kinds of sense to different kinds of readers, despite our best efforts at some perfect expression.
And this learning about writing also transfers to bigger lessons. Writing teaches students discipline and patience with open problems. It teaches new communicative agility and respect for precision. In this, writing centers not only support students; they support faculty and their campuses in keeping the flames of learning alive.
Writing centers should be championed, not dissolved. They substantiate some of our purest educational ideals and provide a crucial antidote to the student learning crisis unfolding in classrooms across the country. Colleges are racing to outspend each other with new AI-focused programming. But individualized, human support for student learning should not be sacrificed on the altar of these ambitions.
In the world I want to live in, our students are the future, not AI.
Lizzie Hutton is an associate professor of English at Miami University, Ohio, where she also directs the Howe Writing Center.
This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: AI makes college writing centers more important, not less | Opinion
