Why the Closing of Harvard’s Writing Center Matters

It is not every day that the laying off of a university bureaucrat generates a torrent of criticism from students, faculty, and alumni.

But Jane Rosenzweig was not just any university bureaucrat, and she was not presiding over just any administrative fiefdom.

The dismantling of Harvard University’s writing center, and the laying off of Rosenzweig, its director—both announced last month—has been met with outcry shading into outrage.

It has produced a minor literature of student-newspaper coverage , disapproving social-media posts , and angry emails.

An open letter from current and former writing-center tutors protesting the decision had more than 100 signatories.

The passionate response is partly a testament to Rosenzweig herself, who was a beloved figure on campus.

Among the flood of comments from former writing-center employees were a number that described her as the best boss they’d ever had.

The backlash is also about what Rosenzweig represents: She has been a champion of human writing in the age of AI, through both her work at the center—where undergraduate students received coaching on how to revise and refine papers for their classes—and her essays on Substack.

“Our students are not products to be moved down a frictionless assembly line,” she wrote in 2024, “and the hard work of reading, writing, and thinking is not a problem to be solved.” Rosenzweig, who worked as an editor at The Atlantic from 1994 to 1997, has become a kind of synecdoche for the very idea of taking writing and the liberal arts seriously at Harvard in the post-ChatGPT world.

Brandon Kingdollar, a former tutor who graduated in 2024, wrote in a comment on the open letter that her layoff “sends a clear message to today’s students that nurturing their abilities to write and think for themselves is no longer a priority.” Harvard’s leadership, he added, seems to be saying that “it is perfectly acceptable” for students to “outsource these important skills to AI agents.” A Harvard faculty member who requested anonymity so that he could speak openly told me he worried that the elimination of the center could be seen as part of a broader trend of “real boosterism” of AI on campus—one that students feel acutely.

“There is an impression among students that they’re being told by people in positions of authority that really getting good at using AI is essential to what college is going to be for them and for their future career success,” he said. [ Read: ChatGPT doesn’t have to ruin college ] Harvard’s undergraduate college has held AI training sessions and given students access to premium chatbots including Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s ChatGPT Edu, and Anthropic’s Claude.