Part of what we have to be, if we’re writing center professionals, part of what we’re drawn to is an ability to be responsive. Anybody who wants to live a life in and around a writing center is someone who’s deeply invested in responsiveness.

–Beth Boquet

They say that you shouldn’t meet your heroes, but the folks who say that don’t have heroes like Beth Boquet. Dr. Boquet, Professor of English and Director of the Writing Center at Fairfield University in Fairfield, Connecticut, USA, wrote “‘Our Little Secret’: A History of Writing Centers, Pre- to Post-Open Admissions” in 1999, and it quickly entered the canon of essential articles in writing center studies. The article traces the history of writing centers up to that point, following two threads. The first of these sees writing centers as a methodology in which students receive remedial tutoring, which very often happens to be the institutional aims, too.

First, one history, and very often the institutional aim, of writing centers sees them as a methodology in which students receive remedial tutoring, relying on a deficit model of student learning; students lack something and writing centers help fix it. The second way to view the history is as a site. This lens shows writing centers as a space wherein tutor and student engage in conversation to become more sophisticated writers and thinkers. She calls this the “excessive” writing center, where students and tutors alike come to find joy and satisfy intellectual curiosity with one another. Dr. Boquet doesn’t argue that one vision of history has won over the other, but rather that both happen simultaneously depending on the different situations faced by a writing center.

On the occasion of the article’s twenty-fifth anniversary, I spoke to Dr. Boquet about the origins of the article, the shape of writing center studies in the subsequent twenty-five years, and what has become of the excessive writing center. I have edited our conversation for clarity and length. We start by discussing how she started the piece, which came out of a chapter of Dr. Boquet’s dissertation, and how the two versions of history came to shape the article.

CWCAB Blog: Can you explain the circumstances that lead to you writing “Our Little Secret?”

Beth Boquet: I had done part of my dissertation on writing center history, but when I started to break out the history piece of the dissertation [for an article], it felt very dull and flat. When I started at Fairfield my mentor, Mariann Regan, who was one of the people who started the writing center, had started a few folders and things from the center that she left for me. And I thought, ‘let me just go through these’ and it was little history meets big history, right? It was like the moment where I started thinking about the fact that the writing center that I was now directing had its own history and, its own teeny tiny little archive, that was, I think the, the germ for a lot of how that piece opened up to be something other than the dissertation chapter.

Excessiveness I think for me comes in always being willing to say “How are we going to do the next thing?”

CWCAB Blog: How did you come up with the term “excessive” writing center? Before I knew the article, it was the excessiveness—the ways writing centers exceed their boundaries—that made me love them so much.

Beth Boquet: I think a few things. I had a fair amount of experience, especially for the time, as a tutor in a writing center. I tutored as an undergraduate, even though it was more like an academic resource center, a tutoring center, but I was still tutoring writing in that center. And then I tutored in graduate school as well at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. I think I knew from that work as a tutor that the most interesting thing about being in a writing center were all of these moments that were in and around writing somehow, but when we’re not necessarily directly in session. That was really interesting to me, and how I came up with some of the framing around excessiveness. It’s probably two-fold. Part of that is I was just doing reading in other areas. I mean, even in my grad program, I credit folks who were very interested in the ways that institutions of higher education wanted to discipline pretty much everyone. I didn’t know that going into graduate school and I learned, I developed a framework through that work, to begin thinking about how constraining our disciplinary work supposed to be. And I’m just sort of an iconoclast at heart. If you tell me I need to go left, I want to know why I can’t go right. And I might not even ask you why I can’t go right; I’m just going to go right. So I think that excessiveness came from some of the reading. It came from the Trinh Minh-ha, it came from Diane Davis’s work, it was just a great moment to be breaking open these expectations of constraints and conformity, and to think of the writing center as one of the places really in all of my education where I experienced the possibility of doing that.

CWCAB Blog: What do you think about the trend towards empirical research in writing centers? I ask because I’ve found two anecdotes from your work incredibly useful as a director. First, the excessive center we’ve been talking about, and then the opening of Noise from the Writing Center, which I use for evidence of success when someone complains about noise. Is there room for the meaningful anecdote in writing center studies?

Beth Boquet: The first thing that makes me think is, “Nobody’s going to give you room for your stories. You’ve got to make space for your story.” And so definitely, I love thinking about it that way, you know, that there’s room and you’ve got to muscle your way in there. Now, in terms of the data driven stuff, one of the things that I really think about is the College English article that Neal Lerner and I published, encouraging the field to move beyond its reliance on North. It was largely a call for more data driven scholarship. I’m not going to say I feel responsible for that, but I certainly think that people took that call seriously and it has had its own legs. It is used to shore up some of the, you know, some of the RAD research that definitely is characterizing a lot of current scholarship. I don’t think it’s an either/or situation, but I do think that ultimately people have a lot of faith in numbers. We shouldn’t have faith in numbers. Numbers are information, you know. It’s information and that’s fine, but at the end of the day it’s not going to be numbers that make your case for anything. None of us should think that. I’ve had thirty years at the same institution and paying a lot of attention to a lot of other people’s institutions, and I would say that I have never seen numbers truly persuade anyone of anything. I’ve seen them used rhetorically, but they don’t change anybody’s mind. It’s stories that change people’s mind. It’s conversation. It’s all the things we know about in writing centers. That’s what makes the difference.

CWCAB Blog: Great. Thank you for that answer. Shifting gears a bit, what do you think has happened in the subsequent twenty-five years since the article’s publication? You’ve already started to answer this, but we have these two threads that you trace of writing center history. Where have those threads gone and where have they intersected or diverged since 1999?

Beth Boquet: What would you say the two threads are? I want to hear you say that back to me.

CWCAB Blog: That’s a good question. One way to frame them is site versus pedagogy, right? Another would be excessive versus institutional. I think I waffle between those two when I’m talking about the article with my students, but I don’t think it’s a one-to-one relationship, where an institutional history is always tied to pedagogy and excessive is always tied to site.

Beth Boquet: I’ll think about it as site and method. I would say of the method or the methods, the underlying practices that are highly relational, that I have much more confidence in those for the long term. As for sites, I feel that, personally, that has not gone in my own career where I would have hoped. I think broadly, it’s murkier than I would have expected over the last several decades. What I mean by that is that the persistent thinking across many, many institutions is that tutoring is perfectly fine and people do not understand or are not convinced by the idea of what a writing center as a site means. I would not bet on the kind of trajectory for writing center sites that I initially thought was going to happen over my career. I do not think it has happened and I don’t see it happening broadly in individual places.

CWCAB Blog: Can you say more about what you did expect to happen?

Beth Boquet: Well, you know, I thought that we were really at a moment when I entered the profession of increasing professionalization of writing center sites. And I really thought that those were going to become more deeply situated in institutions. They certainly could have because we’ve certainly seen a growth in an awareness and a certain kind of at least lip service to the importance of student leadership, the importance of student engagement, the importance of peer-to-peer practices. I mean, we hear that on campuses all over the place. But we could have seen, I think, much more well-developed sites of writing centers broadly across the US. I don’t think that has happened.

CWCAB Blog: No, I don’t think so either. That’s why North’s article remains so relevant. That’s also one of the things I sometimes find frustrating; I don’t want it to be the field to be about a grievance, so there’s this kind of balance between recognizing how important that article is and that work is without it becoming our identity. The writing centers I have worked in have had almost constant changes happening in terms of staffing, administrative structure, etc. But I don’t want to only think about the ways we continue to be outsiders.

Beth Boquet: Exactly. And it can’t be [about grievance]. I think that’s where some of the excessive comes in. The work will still need to be done, [even if we focus on our grievances], and that’s why the method/site piece comes in, right? The work is the habitus of those of us in writing centers, in a very Bourdieu sense. It’s how we move through our days, in our institutions. I think part of what we have to be, if we’re writing center professionals, part of what we’re drawn to is an ability to be responsive. Anybody who wants to live a life in and around a writing center is someone who’s deeply invested in responsiveness. So, I used to report to the provost and now I’m reporting to the dean. Okay, let’s figure out what that means. Excessiveness I think for me comes in always being willing to say “How are we going to do the next thing?”

About the Author

Graham Stowe is an assistant professor of English, Director of the Writing Center, and Director of First-Year Writing at Canisius University in Buffalo, New York. His research focuses on critical pedagogy and its relationship to writing center pedagogy. He teaches first-year writing, writing center pedagogy courses and advanced composition. He lives in Amherst, New York with his family and a dog named Spatula.