Open Admissions and the Construction of Writing Center History: A Tale of Three Models

Abstract

Given their knowledge of the workings of language, few writing center professionals would doubt that material history is always more complex than the discourse that strives to record it.And most would certainly recognize that historical discourse constructs the past at least as much as it records it.Despite this dilemma, writing center scholars recently have given increased attention to writing center history.Each account of a center in Writing Centers in Context { 1993) includes a history, albeit brief; Christina Murphy and Joe Law's Landmark Essays on Writing Centers { 1 995) opens with a group of historical essays; at the 1995 NWCA Convention, Murphy and Law discussed history in a session prefiguring a forthcoming historical bibliography; my own "Early Writing Centers: Toward a History" (1 995) argues that centers before 1970 had much in common with centers today; and David Healy's "In the Temple of the Familiar: The Writing Center as Church" (1995) raises historical questions as he asserts that the denominationalism evident in church history may offer a way of framing center history.This work indicates a desire and need to construct an elaborately detailed and historiographically sophisticated model that would more effectively account for the complexity of writing center development than has previous historical work.I call such a model the cultural model of writing center history, for it would draw upon the post-structural assumptions and moves of recent cultural criticism and new historicism.A cultural model would be aware of its own role in historicizing, the dilemma of representing history in language, and the need for thick descriptions of the multiple forces impacting writing centers.It would account for progress with an awareness that

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