Writing Center needs funding,
says senate

by Sarah R. Buchholz, Chronicle staff

he importance of writing instruction on campus was underscored Oct. 19 as the Faculty Senate adopted a motion that includes a call for additional funding for the Writing Center with the goal of broadening its scope "to include additional tutors and faculty support for writing in courses across the University."

     The motion was part of the Annual Report of the University Writing Committee, which is charged with recommending policies concerning the operation and administration of the Writing Center, among other things.

     "No, I don't think we're doing an adequate job now," Marcia Curtis, acting director of the Writing Program, told the senate. "I think we're doing the best we can on $10,000 and a quarter of a salary." Curtis said the center provides 36 contact hours per week of tutoring to serve the writing needs of the campus's more than 18,000 undergraduates.

     Neighboring UConn's Writing Center offers 160 contact hours per week in the fall and spring semesters plus some summer hours for its fewer than 12,000 undergraduates, according to its director Karen Cajka. Her center's tutoring budget usually amounts to 23,000 by the end of the year, she said. The center also funds four part-time receptionists (an equivalent of 1.5 FTE) and two half-time directors. The UConn center generally serves freshman English classes but has recently begun expanding its mission to provide tutors grounded in a variety of disciplines to better serve student writers in fields outside of English, Cajka said.

     The Writing Lab at the University of Missouri-Columbia, which enrolls about the same number of undergraduates as this campus, provides 200 hours per week of in-person tutoring and 35 hours of online tutoring for freshman English and all other courses not designated "writing intensive." The lab's budget is $38,000 plus salaries for two professional staff members and additional funding from the campus's English department, residence life, and other sources, according to Elaine Hocks, the lab's director.

     Missouri separately funds tutoring and extensive faculty support for its more than 110 writing-intensive courses each semester through its Campus Writing Program. This program provides an additional 90 to 100 contact hours of tutoring per week for students in these courses. The program's tutoring budget is about $43,000, according to Jo Ann Vogt, coordinator of student services and faculty consultant for education and social sciences/humanities and arts.

     The tutoring service receives a little more than one FTE staff member to support it. The remainder of the program's five full-time staffers' hours are devoted to faculty support and administration of the writing-intensive courses.

     The senate's Writing Committee report said that "despite an already bare-bones budget, the Writing Program was able to make" a required 2 percent budget cut by raising enrollment ceilings in honor sections of the freshman writing class, English 112, from 20 to 24 and training undergraduates to act as peer tutors to fill in for reductions in graduate student staff.

     "[For] several years ... we have said in our annual reports that we perceived a crying need for expansion of this critical size of the Writing Center in order to deal with problems that we see," said Libraries Humanities bibliographer Jim Kelly, a member of the committee. "More people need to be served. There needs to be a sufficiently larger space and larger staff."

     "We offer tutoring to the undergraduates who find us," Curtis said, "but because of our limited funds, we cannot really advertise that the tutoring center is open. My understanding is that there are many, many junior-year [writing seminar] teachers and students, as well as other students who are not in junior-year [writing] classes but who are taking writing currently in the curriculum, who are not getting the tutoring they need, have nowhere to go for it. There is also insufficient money within our Writing Center to go out in among the teachers in the junior year and to help them with support, workshops, and simply to make other information available, so I think that's [what] the committee is ... asking to remedy in this request."

     Lisa Saunders of Economics said that she has seen "a devastating effect on the morale, not on the students themselves, but on the faculty who teach the [junior-year writing] courses" in Social and Behavioral Sciences, as a result of large class sizes and limited support. Some faculty are refusing to teach junior writing classes, she said.

     Curtis said former Writing Center director Peter Elbow had estimated that $100,000 would "establish a really working writing center with a director of the center and sufficient tutoring money with tutors to support it." She said $100,000 would allow the director and a staff to provide support to faculty teaching writing courses, as well as supply sufficient tutors for existing courses. Curtis said part of Elbow's impetus to draft that budget had been the possibility that the General Education Task Force would recommend adding two writing-intensive courses to the graduation requirements for a bachelor's degree.

     The committee's report indicated that Writing Committee members who attended the March 24 General Education Task Force explained how writing-intensive courses should work and argued against adding further writing requirements until a "fully funded Writing Center able to provide support for both faculty and students of existing and proposed writing classes" is in place.

     "The Writing Program has got a problem," said senate secretary Ernie May. "I ... support the motion that this is not an allocation of a certain amount of money... but that the administration look at what we need to do to provide adequate funding for the Writing Program."