As institutions cope with the difficult task of managing scarce resources to support student learning, college writing centers, like other student services, need to be able to articulate and, at times, quantify the benefits they offer the populations they serve. This study examined outcomes associated with visiting the writing center at one American community college in a southern town. Using binary logistic regression, the researchers compared the effects of writing center visitation on the probability of passing and/or earning an A for students enrolled in introductory English and psychology courses, while accounting for other student-level covariates including prior GPA, SES, and minority status. Results indicated that writing center visitors were significantly more likely to pass their English courses and were more likely to earn As in both subjects. Further, the level of visitation was a significant predictor of student outcomes, particularly in English courses, with students who visited the most frequently experiencing a significantly increased likelihood of both passing and earning As. Overall, these results suggested that writing center visitation was meaningfully associated with students’ success in these courses at this institution, after accounting for additional individual-level variables commonly identified as predictors of educational outcomes.

When most writing centers in the United States were being founded and developed, colleges and universities had very few entities they labeled “centers.” Today, however, centers are cropping up with increasing regularity. At our own institutions, we have (between us) Centers for Humanities, Centers for Advanced Materials Research, Centers for Cognitive Studies, Centers for the Study of First Americans— even a Center for Epigraphy. It seems worth pausing to consider this phenomenon: Where are all these centers coming from, and why are they proliferating so rapidly? One strong possibility: Centers create spaces for the kind of work that needs to be done in higher education, work that is difficult or impossible to do within traditional disciplinary frameworks. In almost every case, for example, the previously mentioned centers allow for interor cross-disciplinary research and scholarship, and at their best they encourage highly productive forms of collaboration. Furthermore, they often initiate projects designed to bring college and community closer together. In short, these new centers seem to us one of the major signs of stress on old ways of taxonomizing and creating knowledge. Their growing popularity signals, we think, one institutional response to changing educational demands, populations, budgets, and technologies. We are well aware that these are difficult times at most community colleges, colleges, and universities, and that faculty and staff in many writing centers must spend an inordinate amount of time struggling to provide basic services. Nevertheless we wish to emphasize those opportunities that we believe are available to writing centers, even those that are in various ways marginalized on their campuses. The opportunities that we will discuss involve four potentials that we see for institutional refiguration: the refiguration of institutional space, of concepts of knowlWork Cited