When the writing requirements went away: an institutional case study of twenty years of decentralization/abolition

While composition scholars have long discussed the theoretical benefits of replacing the traditional first-year composition model with "decentralized" writing instruction, few have examined the long-term consequences of decentralization for writing programs and the undergraduate students they serve. This article presents the story of writing instruction at one public urban university over nearly two decades of decentralization. In an institutional case study that draws on the administrative and teaching experiences of several writing program administrators, as well as a range of quantitative and qualitative assessment data collected since the early 2000s, we discuss the promises, the profits, and the pitfalls of decentralization as it played out at our university. In our context, widely varying writing abilities among incoming students met insufficient institutional resources and a lack of clear programmatic responsibility for students' writing development, resulting in broad inconsistency in both the writing instruction that undergraduates received and their writing abilities by the time they reached upper-division courses. In recent years, our university has attempted to address these issues in a variety of ways. Here, we share our lessons learned (too often the hard way), and offer suggestions for other writing programs considering decentralization in their own institutional contexts.