Early Writing Centers: Toward a History

Abstract

Since the inception of the Writing Lab Newsletter in 1977 and The Writing Center Journalúittt years later, documenting writing center history is not difficult.Articles in these journals enable writing center scholars to construct a reasonably detailed history back into the early 1 970 s, when open admissions initiatives precipitated the growth of writing centers.While this rich data certainly helps centers of today to locate themselves in relation to the past twenty years, little has been said about writing centers before that time.Though not nearly as numerous as today, centers (usually established under the name lab or clinic) did exist before 1970, and references to them dot historical texts in composition.Writing center discourse, however, has largely ignored early centers or has monolithically represented them as deficient.When they have been mentioned, they have been constructed as poor cousins of English departments, stereotypical "remedial fix-it shops" where an unenlightened staff administers current-traditional pedagogy to underprepared and poorly regarded students.Witness Ray Wallace's delineation of the features of the writing "lab": *funded by a single department, English in most cases *where freshman come to get help *where the focus is on error *which is badly staffed *which is not held in high esteem in the academy *where "bad" people are sent (even remanded) (83)From these elements, Wallace constructs a model of the past in an essay which champions the present and future need for building cross-curricular

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