Harvard closes their university writing center to save money in the new age of AI

quote:

---

A Harvard faculty member who requested anonymity so that he could speak openly told me he worried that the elimination of the center could be seen as part of a broader trend of “real boosterism” of AI on campus—one that students feel acutely. “There is an impression among students that they’re being told by people in positions of authority that really getting good at using AI is essential to what college is going to be for them and for their future career success,” he said.

---

quote:

---

Harvard’s undergraduate college has held AI training sessions and given students access to premium chatbots including Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s ChatGPT Edu, and Anthropic’s Claude. The university also maintains a webpage directed at faculty members titled “Teach With Generative AI”—oddly phrased as a command—that lays out resources for “leveraging LLM features” and boasts about Harvard’s record of embracing “new technology across our classrooms, residential and virtual.” Students and faculty might have good reason to use AI products in certain educational contexts. But the university generally leaves the policing of these “resources” up to individual faculty members, even as AI use has become widespread among students. A survey conducted this year by The Harvard Crimson found that the average student used AI to complete 34.5 percent of their homework, and that more than one in 10 students used AI to complete 70 to 100 percent of their work.

---

quote:

---

he went on, “Consolidating the writing center sounds alarming until you understand that the ‘writing center’ was merely a sub-unit of the Harvard Writing Program, which will continue to oversee our first-year writing courses.” The school still employs many experts on writing pedagogy, she said, and Harvard’s writing program will make sure that students receive “the best, most up-to-date, guidance about writing in an age of AI.”

---

quote:

---

Some in the Harvard community see the demise of the center as simply a regrettable but necessary concession to financial conditions. The school has a reported $365 million budget shortfall and has been making a number of changes to address it. One tenured professor in the humanities, who requested anonymity because of how controversial the decision has become, told me that the school has had to do “a couple of rounds of very painful cuts.” The professor said that he believes that eliminating the writing center could also help address a well-documented problem of administrative bloat. Harvard’s administrative staff has expanded at several times the rate of faculty in recent years. “Everyone thinks, in the abstract, there should be belt tightening,” the professor said. “But whenever a concrete person is let go, everyone screams.”

---