What Schools Lose Without Communications Experts

• Writing and communication experts can help ensure students build communication skills progressively rather than only through isolated assignments and tutoring appointments.
• Eliminating a dedicated writing center and its leadership can weaken an institution’s ability to respond strategically to changing communication needs and workplace expectations.
• As AI makes polished communication easier to produce, communication experts can work with faculty to design responsive curricula that develop students’ judgment, critical thinking, and ethical reasoning.

 
In July, Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, announced that it was eliminating the position of its longtime writing center director and consolidating the center’s functions into the university’s Academic Resource Center. The move was part of a broader restructuring within Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. In the announcement, a university official emphasized that students “will continue to be able to work with writing tutors and access other resources previously provided by the Center.”

On its surface, then, this change could be seen as a reasonable effort to preserve student-facing services while streamlining administration. But the decision raises the possibility that other universities could take similar actions. Tutoring centers are largely focused on helping students understand concepts they will be tested over; communication centers are focused on helping students develop specific skills, address different audiences, and improve their work over time. Imposing a traditional tutoring center model on communication services fails to acknowledge this fundamental difference.

This leads to a larger question: Is access to tutoring, without the professional expertise of a center director and investment in specialized staff and resources, sufficient in such a rapidly changing educational landscape?

As schools look at Harvard’s decision, they must consider what such standalone centers, and their leaders, bring to a university community. Effective writing and communication centers are more than collections of tutoring appointments. Their faculty and professional staff develop pedagogy, partner with instructors on assignment development, and identify emerging student needs. They also help institutions adapt communication instruction to changing educational and professional demands while creating opportunities for students to refine human skills such as judgment and critical thinking.

When schools are thinking about reducing costs or reallocating resources, institutions should consider not just which services to continue to make accessible to students. They must factor in how any resulting loss of professional expertise may diminish their faculty’s capacity to shape curriculum and respond to emerging needs.

The role of a communication center’s director varies by institution and often depends on the authority and access college leadership provides. Regardless of their formal charge, however, directors are generally well positioned to help institutions determine how communication instruction should evolve across the curriculum. They often do this by:

• Developing communication pedagogy based on professional and industry best practices.
• Integrating communication programming across curricula.
• Leading institutional responses to evolving market demands and academic program needs.

Taken together, these critical functions illustrate what universities risk losing when they treat writing and communication support as interchangeable with content tutoring. That risk increases when they eliminate salaried positions for the experts who keep their schools’ communication-focused curricula in line with market demands.

Who Guides Communication Instruction?

Writing and communication center directors and other professional staff continually study how communication skills are best taught, developed, and supported. They draw on formal research and professional organizations while also staying closely connected to employers, other stakeholders, and emerging educational and workplace technologies.

Over time, that work gives directors a broad view of how professional communication norms and employer expectations are changing, as well as how new tools are reshaping what students need to learn. That accumulated expertise can then inform strategic curricular and institutional decisions.

Done well, a writing center’s work creates an intentional progression of learning, allowing students to build communication skills over time.

Writing centers also help extend communication instruction beyond the tutoring space and into the curriculum itself. Depending on the institution, their directors and staff may oversee communication courses directly or work with faculty and academic programs to determine where communication skills should be introduced, reinforced, and assessed. Done well, this work creates an intentional progression of learning, allowing students to build communication skills over time rather than encountering them only in isolated assignments or tutoring appointments.

That progression, however, cannot remain static. As professional expectations and academic priorities change, institutions must revisit both what students need to learn and how communication should be taught. Generative AI provides perhaps the clearest current example. As these tools reshape professional communication, colleges and universities must decide not only which skills still matter most, but also where AI belongs in the learning process.

Communication experts can guide those decisions strategically because they understand both the pedagogical goals of communication instruction and the changing demands students will face beyond the classroom.

Confronting the AI Challenge

Anyone who works closely with students has seen how profoundly generative AI has changed the learning process. Students now have access to tools capable of producing relatively high-quality writing, visuals, presentations, and analyses with remarkable ease. These outputs can appear to surpass what developing communicators could produce independently, making AI seem like an effortless step forward. The problem is that students often discount the importance of the distinct human skills that AI does not possess.

The challenge is that producing a polished artifact is not the same as possessing the judgment necessary to evaluate, refine, or use it responsibly. Many students are still learning how to bring their own judgment and voices to their AI-assisted work. Helping them develop those capabilities has therefore become an important part of communication education.

Traditionally, communication instruction has emphasized mechanics, word usage, and the quality of the finished product. Instructors might incorporate processes such as drafting and editing, but rarely assess the thinking embedded within those less visible stages. Effective communication, however, requires students to focus on much more than sentence-level correctness; it requires them to make judgments about audience, purpose, ethics, and the assumptions underlying their messages.

As AI makes competent communication easier to generate, students may fail to do the cognitive work that their pre-AI cohorts had once developed through writing and presenting on their own. It therefore becomes incumbent on institutions to make curricular changes that ensure that students practice the cognitive work required for them to become excellent writers and presenters.

The first step is helping students understand the human skills inherent in communication: judgment, critical thinking, audience awareness, interpersonal communication, ethical reasoning, and the ability to make decisions under ambiguity. AI can increasingly help produce the artifact, but it cannot remove the need for students to understand what they are trying to accomplish and why. Instructors and communication experts both play central roles in navigating this tension.

Dedicated writing centers and their leadership bring an intentionality to their institutions’ curricula.

The second step is to redesign communication instruction so that these human capabilities are explicit learning outcomes. Assignments and assessments must increasingly ask students to demonstrate the judgment behind their choices: why they used AI, where they challenged or revised its output, how they adapted a message for a particular audience, and when human involvement was necessary.

Achieving this objective does not mean that faculty must abandon traditional writing or presentation instruction. Instead, they must become more intentional about which parts of the communication process students should perform independently, where AI can productively assist, and how they assess the thinking that occurs along the way. That intentionality is exactly what dedicated writing centers and their leadership bring to their institutions’ curricula.

Instructional Support Is Not a Strategy

At the very moment communication expertise is increasingly needed, universities may be tempted to preserve only a center’s most visible function: tutoring. From a budgetary perspective, an institution may be able to eliminate a salaried leadership position while retaining critical student services. But that calculation conflates the delivery of a service with the expertise required to shape, improve, and adapt it.

Tutors perform enormously valuable work. They can help students think through an argument, revise a document, or prepare a presentation. But tutors do not determine how communication should develop across an academic program, lead faculty through curricular change, interpret shifting workplace expectations, or help an institution reconsider learning outcomes in response to generative AI. Those functions require sustained expertise, institutional knowledge, and the authority to act.

At the University of Iowa’s Tippie College of Business in Iowa City, for instance, we treat communication support as more than a student service. We have increasingly integrated communication expertise into curricular planning and broader initiatives around AI and human skill development. Our communication faculty and staff work closely with colleagues across departments to strengthen assignments and embed communication more deliberately into the student experience.

As AI reshapes what employers expect of students, colleges and universities will need professionals who can define, teach, and continually refine the human capabilities that matter.

We also engage with advisory boards to better understand what communication skills employers expect from Tippie graduates and what skills recent graduates say they needed in their first professional roles. Just as important, we ensure that communication expertise is represented in Tippie’s strategic planning conversations, so that human skills remain a central part of how Tippie thinks about the future of business education.

This level of integration does more than simply allow communication experts to respond to student needs as they arise. It gives them a role in helping the college anticipate what students will need next.

Keeping Up With Communication’s Evolution

AI is undoubtedly changing the nature of professional communication. That means schools must help faculty and academic leaders reconsider learning outcomes and assignment design, all while maintaining a balance between technological fluency and distinctly human skills. In this way, communication expertise is more than a resource students access when they need help with a presentation; it is an essential part of an institution’s capacity to adapt to the changing skill sets employers will require as technologies continue to evolve.

Regardless of whether Harvard’s restructuring is an isolated decision or the first step in a broader industry shift, institutions should be careful about equating tutoring with expertise. As AI reshapes what students can produce and what employers will expect of them, colleges and universities will need professionals who can define, teach, and continually refine the human capabilities that matter more than ever.

Those responsibilities extend far beyond what can happen in a tutoring appointment. If anything, this is a moment for schools to invest more deliberately in communication centers and their leadership, not diminish their roles within their strategic planning.