Even as writing centers have proliferated across American campuses, writing center discourse has been characterized by deep uncertainty. In a provocative, signature moment, Terranee Riley in his 1994 article "The Unpromising Future of the Writing Center" took a retrospective look at the writing center movement and made a gloomy prediction of its future. What he feared most was that the revolutionary potential of writing centers was ending, about to be replaced by a bland era of "business as usual" (21). This would happen because writing centers would progress in finding an "institutional niche" (26). Riley noted that academic disciplines go through developmental stages before achieving institutional recognition, and he recalled how the early teaching of American literature lacked an academic status equal with the study of British and ancient classics. Unfortunately, in Riley's view, once American literature gained recognition as an academic field, it lost an initial, non-elitist, "revolutionary energy"

Try, if you will, to imagine yourself around a campfire late on a dark night. You are with a group of English literature teachers, and they begin swapping horror stories about their students, some true, others probably