U of A is closing 40-year-old writing program

“There are two parts of this ‘delivering on our promise’ that this undermines — the first is student success, and the second is community interaction,” said Nataly Reed, a senior lecturer in the English department at UA’s College of Social and Behavioral Sciences.

“So, I think the impact will be felt very strongly. And, since it’s happening in the middle of the semester, you’re going to have this resource that people have been relying on disappear, and then people have to scramble to find that type of support,” she said, describing herself as a concerned citizen. “The amount of work that (this) five-person team had been doing was really, really important.”

The Writing Skills Improvement Program or WSIP, a service center in the College of Humanities, was created in the 1980s and offered writing support services to clients, including local, national and international students, as well as instructors, administrators and other writers or writing teachers.

WSIP’s mission was to offer services to not just UA faculty, students and staff, but also to middle and high school students to improve their writing and critical thinking skills.

The announcement of WSIP’s closure came in July through an internal email circulated in the College of Humanities, in which college dean Alain-Philippe Durand said the decision was due to recent organizational changes to the college structure and programs following budget allocation decisions for fiscal year 2026.

“While all our educational initiatives and programs provide value, like other colleges and units across the university, we are identifying ways to strengthen our finances, achieve a balanced budget, and support the long-term fiscal health of the institution,” he wrote. “…This decision was reached after careful consideration of multiple factors, including strategic priorities, program sustainability, and overall operational efficiency within the college.”

The closure — to take effect over a month into UA’s fall 2025 semester on Oct. 1 — was announced to the UA community on Aug. 1. The program includes director Andrea Hernandez Holm, three writing specialists and one staff member.

“After more than four decades of service at the University of Arizona, WSIP will be closing its doors this fall,” said the announcement, which also included a list and description of the ways the program supported UA students and community members through the decades.

UA spokesperson Mitch Zak said the UA “continues to offer a wide range of resources to help students grow as writers, including the award-winning Foundations Writing Program and the Think Tank writing center.” He said these two programs offer students support in the classroom and equip them with communications skills.

Zak did not answer questions from the Star, including the details behind WSIP’s closure, if it was related to funding cuts in the College of Humanities, and how much money the UA saved with this closure. He also did not address whether the remaining two writing programs would offer services beyond UA students to middle and high school students like WSIP.

While WSIP had writing specialists as instructors, the Think Tank writing center tutors are UA students who wish to support their peers’ writing development.

Reed — who collaborated with WSIP director Holm on a project in 2024 called “Academic Writing in the Borderlands — said one of the biggest areas of WSIP’s expertise was that all the educators came with at least a master’s or PhD degree.

“The science and craft of writing was their specialty, so they would be able to support people with very specific academic and professional genres which might not be within the experience of a peer tutor,” said Reed, also emphasizing she wasn’t diminishing the services the student peer tutors provided.

WSIP instructors “would know about publication processes and what to do if you’re going to write a peer-reviewed article,” Reed said. “So, they would be able to help people with various steps in publication processes and dissertation processes. I think that’s a huge thing, the amount of support that they gave to graduate students working on their dissertations.”

Zak’s statement also did not address the employment of the three writing specialists and one staff member who were part of WSIP. According to WSIP’s announcement of the closure in August, one of the writing specialists had already found a new job.

According to Arizona Luminaria’s UA searchable salary database, WSIP director Holm’s annual compensation is $78,184, the staff member’s annual salary is $39,234 and the writing specialists’ compensations are in the range of $50,000.