The Writing Program is proud to announce that a longtime supporter of Rutgers has made a commitment to provide an endowment of two million dollars to improve the College Avenue Writing Center. Because of his commitment to improving the writing skills of entry level students, this philanthropic individual is helping the Writing Program realize its commitment to increasing and improving upon the services provided by the CAC Writing Center. Specifically, this endowment will make it possible for the Writing Program to raise the salaries of Writing Center tutors, to increase the CAC Writing Center hours, and, eventually, to expand its operations to include online tutoring.

"Why endow a Writing Center?," you might ask. The Writing Program's three writing centers play an essential role in allowing the program to maintain its high standards. The Writing Centers, which are located on the College Avenue Campus in Murray Hall, on Douglass Campus at 135 George Street, and on Livingston Campus in Lucy Stone Hall, provide the expert supplemental instruction that many students require to compete on a level playing field in the writing classroom. The Writing Centers, in other words, allow New Jersey's flagship university to fulfill its commitment to academic excellence and its mission of serving students from all across the state.

The Rutgers Writing Program's curriculum, nationally recognized for its intellectual seriousness and rigor, seeks to introduce all students to the demands and the pleasures of the life of the mind. To this end, all students are required to become members of the university community by mastering the activities of reading and writing critically about the most pressing issues facing society today. For those students who struggle to meet the challenge of reading essays drawn from The New Republic, Harpers, or Science for example, and those who find they need help learning how to generate ideas and synthesize their thoughts about the assigned materials, the Writing Centers provide essential, supplemental instruction. And for those students who are doing well in their Writing courses, but would like to do better, the Writing Centers are there to provide guidance in how to master the arts of expression. The Writing Centers, in other words, aren't just for struggling students; they are also for students who are looking to excel.

The tutoring provided by the Writing Centers, which is free of charge to all students, is designed to assist all students, regardless of skill level, in becoming independent, self-reflexive thinkers and writers in the university community. In order to achieve this goal, students who come to the Writing Centers for tutoring are required to sign up for a minimum of five eighty-minute sessions. During these sessions, students meet with tutors trained to employ the Writing Program's version of "minimalist tutoring," an approach designed to assist the students in learning how to diagnose and resolve the particular problems that appear in their writing. The combination of this individually-tailored instruction and the required extended contact over the course of the semester insures that the tutoring sessions are not frittered away on one-shot solutions (e.g., emergency proofreading services or, worse yet, thesis provision), but rather are devoted to providing all students with acquiring the skills necessary to fully participate in the university community. In this way, the Writing Centers serve to create a learning environment where every student writer has the opportunity to work with a tutor to develop a curriculum appropriate to his or her needs. In recognition of the commitment such work requires, the University rewards students who successfully complete five sessions of tutoring with 1.5 E credits for the course 355:096. (For a description of this course, please go to the 096 Course Home Page.)

If you're interested in learning more about contributing to the improvement of Writing instruction at Rutgers University, please visit the Rutgers Foundation Page or contact Joseph Stampe, Director of Development, or Richard E. Miller, Associate Director of the Writing Program