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It is not every day that the laying off of a university bureaucrat generates a torrent of criticism from students, faculty, and alumni. But Jane Rosenzweig was not just any university bureaucrat, and she was not presiding over just any administrative fiefdom. The dismantling of Harvard University’s writing center, and the laying off of Rosenzweig, its director—both announced last month—has been met with outcry shading into outrage. It has produced a minor literature of student-newspaper coverage, disapproving social-media posts, and angry emails. An open letter from current and former writing-center tutors protesting the decision had more than 100 signatories.
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The passionate response is partly a testament to Rosenzweig herself, who was a beloved figure on campus. Among the flood of comments from former writing-center employees were a number that described her as the best boss they’d ever had. The backlash is also about what Rosenzweig represents: She has been a champion of human writing in the age of AI, through both her work at the center—where undergraduate students received coaching on how to revise and refine papers for their classes—and her essays on Substack. “Our students are not products to be moved down a frictionless assembly line,” she wrote in 2024, “and the hard work of reading, writing, and thinking is not a problem to be solved.”
Rosenzweig, who worked as an editor at The Atlantic from 1994 to 1997, has become a kind of synecdoche for the very idea of taking writing and the liberal arts seriously at Harvard in the post-ChatGPT world. Brandon Kingdollar, a former tutor who graduated in 2024, wrote in a comment on the open letter that her layoff “sends a clear message to today’s students that nurturing their abilities to write and think for themselves is no longer a priority.” Harvard’s leadership, he added, seems to be saying that “it is perfectly acceptable” for students to “outsource these important skills to AI agents.” 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.
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.
Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education, Amanda Claybaugh, told me that “we must teach students what they need to know about AI, while also ensuring that AI doesn’t interfere with everything else.” She also said that concerns about closing the writing center are “largely a problem of terminology.” She 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.”
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.”
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Still, the fact that some administrators should be laid off and some academic centers should be closed does not make it wise to lay off this administrator and to close this center. When an institution begins subjecting something so fundamental to a college education as writing to the cold logic of spreadsheets and bureaucratic streamlining, it has conceded quite a lot already. This concession may ultimately open the door for administrators of the future to argue that writing instruction should be turned over to robots for the sake of savings and efficiency. “Harvard must make difficult budgetary decisions sometimes,” Mary D. Lewis, a French-history professor, wrote in an email sent to senior administrators. “But the writing center was not an expensive enterprise, and it will likely cost us more down the road to undo the damage done.”
Some of that potential damage will be contained to Harvard. Instructors may have less support in their efforts to defend traditional forms of learning from technological change. Students may have less incentive to do the challenging work of original writing instead of turning to ChatGPT. But the consequences of the decision to close the writing center may be felt far beyond the campus in Cambridge. Last year, I traveled to Montana State University for a week as a writer-in-residence. There, I met with students and faculty to talk about journalism and creative nonfiction. The highlight of the trip was a Q&A session with the university’s writing-center tutors. I left with an ultramarine MSU Writing Center T-shirt and an overwhelming admiration for the students and staff who were doing their best, with limited resources and watery office coffee, to make a case for going to the center rather than using the bots.
The tutors I spoke with at MSU said that they try to model writing as a creative, collaborative activity, one that happens between a scholar and a community rather than between an individual and his or her screen. They meet with students one-on-one to brainstorm ideas, read essays out loud, and critique their personal styles. When I heard the news about Harvard’s writing center, my first thought was not about the students and instructors there, but about the ones back in Montana.
College and university bureaucracies tend to have a strong mimetic streak. Institutions with lower academic rankings often emulate the initiatives and priorities of their higher-ranked peers. Harvard is the apex predator in America’s higher-ed ecosystem, and it has substantial power to influence what counts as essential to a good education. The decisions that Harvard makes create a permission structure for other institutions to follow suit—after all, if one of the most venerable schools in the country doesn’t need a writing center in order to be “elite,” why would a public university, or a regional liberal-arts college, or a community college need one? Why does Montana State need one? Administrators, boards of trustees, and state legislatures will almost certainly be asking these questions. Harvard has made it easier for them to decide that original writing—and, by extension, original thought—isn’t worth the cost.
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