I’m a Writing Tutor at Harvard. The College is Failing Us.

Pushing open the doors to the conference room in the Academic Resource Center, I looked around for a seat among incoming and experienced tutors. It was my first staff meeting as a tutor in the Harvard Writing Center, and I was filled with excitement and hopeful anticipation about my new job. Then I found out the implications of what had changed.

Harvard’s Writing Center has arguably been dismantled. At the end of July, former Writing Center director Jane Rosenzweig was abruptly laid off. Moreover, the Center’s functions were consolidated — stripping it of several types of programming that made it so accessible and valuable in the first place. These changes are more than a staffing decision; they are a microcosm of a culture that is increasingly willing to treat human-to-human learning as dispensable when it matters most.

The Center’s restructuring was met with swift backlash, as both former and current writing tutors called the decisions “reckless.” To others, these policy shifts seemed harmless on paper. But how have they played out in practice? Horribly.

As tutors, we are not holding drop-in office hours anymore. Instead, we are being asked to choose our own locations to host tutoring, including in public spaces like libraries or dining halls, leaving the Center more physically decentralized. We are also no longer presenting in Expos — Harvard’s introductory writing classes for first-years — a once-useful avenue to inform students about the help the Writing Center can provide.

By removing the accessibility of drop-in hours and taking away the visibility that Expos visits provided, it is generally harder for tutors to do their jobs effectively. The College is actively demonstrating that it would rather cut what’s hard to measure than defend what’s hard to replace.

Even more concerning, the overhaul of the Center comes at a time when Harvard College Dean David J. Deming suggested not just acceptance, but encouragement of the use of artificial intelligence in longer-form writing assignments at the College. We must also acknowledge the backdrop of a presidential administration that has spent over a year waging an extremely public war on higher education — and specifically Harvard — over its funding, research, and independence.

I am not claiming that there is a causal relationship between this context and the recent decisions at the College. But the Writing Center’s dismantling evokes a broader pattern of institutions treating human learning and connection as costs to cut, not values to protect. It is not primarily the technology or the infrastructure being impacted; it is the human-to-human relationship.

When a student goes to the Writing Center, the tutor does not merely hand them a better thesis or line of reasoning. Instead, the tutor sits with the student, asking them why they think what they think, and why they write what they write. We help them discover the answers to their own questions and grasp writing and thinking lessons they can apply to all facets of life.

The tutoring process takes time and trust, and also requires the student to be vulnerable and ask for help, which is an especially challenging task at an institution like Harvard where there is external pressure to already “know what you’re doing” academically.

That kind of cultivating experience is essential at Harvard, and it is disappearing at the wrong moment. If a student is stuck on a paper the night before it’s due and the accessible, low-stakes writing help doesn’t exist, the most available option is no longer another human — it’s AI. But AI doesn’t require students to explain their thinking, rework their prose, or comprehend how to improve their writing. The learning is removed.

Some might argue these changes are not unique to the Writing Center and are instead part of a broader, necessary restructuring. But while the new administrative model aimed to streamline by “organizing staff into functional teams with deeper expertise,” the adjustments to the Writing Center went the opposite direction, impacting the entire Center and all of the tutors who work with students weekly. Ultimately, someone decided that this office was worth weakening.

When Harvard’s own leadership tells students that AI is the future of their education, and political leaders spend their days trying to prove that universities are worth defunding in the first place, it seems Harvard is conceding to the argument that human relationships are replaceable.

A student sitting across from another student, learning something, is a cost worth paying. What else is a university for?

Tara G. Malhotra ’29, a Crimson Editorial editor, lives in Cabot House.