By now the internet rage cycle has moved on, but last week a great many people were looking at and talking about a powerpoint slide from a University of Houston Faculty Senate meeting. Aside from the remarkable fact that 1) something exciting and noteworthy happened at a faculty senate meeting, and 2) a powerpoint slide was that ‘something exciting,’ the presentation itself did make some remarkable recommendations. The question is whether these types of recommendations, and the heightened presence of guns on Texas campuses after August 1st, make any difference to writing centers.

As part of our monthly Consultant Spotlight series, today we sit down with David Vaughan DeVine, a graduating senior and long-time writing consultant at the University of Texas at Austin's University Writing Center, to talk about his experience as a writing center consultant, as a scholar, and as a colleague.

In Writing Center Studies we have plenty of data, both quantitative and qualitative, on how to best work with writers. Techniques for working with specific populations, ways of theorizing the uniqueness of writing center work in higher education, and strategies for continual improvement are our stock in trade, and over the last fifty years Writing Center Studies has become an academic field characterized by longevity and supported by substantial research. While research on how to best perform writing center work is ongoing, one area of Writing Center Studies has received almost no attention: the labor conditions in which writing center work is done. A new study currently soliciting for participation aims to change that.