Happy trails to you, until we meet again.
Happy trails to you, keep smilin' until then.
Who cares about the clouds when we're together?
Just sing a song and bring the sunny weather.
Happy trails to you, 'till we meet again.

Some trails are happy ones,
Others are blue.
It's the way you ride the trail that counts,
Here's a happy one for you.

Today a public/private partnership between New America, Arizona State University and the online magazine Slate will hold an event called “Trust But Verify: The Crisis in Biomedicine.” The ‘crisis’ the title refers to results from a recent, widespread realization that important research in the field may be fundamentally flawed, a majority of it impossible to replicate for various reasons. This same crisis is occurring in the field of psychology, causing practitioners to question some of their basic clinical assumptions. An obvious question presents itself: is there a reproducibility crisis in writing center research?

I’ve spent a lot of time as the only man in the room. Having worked (mostly with infants) in early childhood education after earning my English degree, and having attended a master’s program in feminist theory, spaces where women are the norm are familiar and pleasant places to me. Maybe this is why I like writing centers. 

Two weeks ago today the North American writing center community was shocked and saddened to hear that the University of British Columbia, one of the largest and oldest universities in Canada, ranked among the 50 most reputable universities in the world by U.S. News & World Report, Times Higher Education, and The Academic Ranking of World Universities while educating 58,000 students on two campuses that occupy nearly 15,000 acres, plans to close their writing center in September 2016.

Today we are restarting another feature from vintage Praxis: the Featured Center. This feature's original purpose was to provide an opportunity for writing centers to share information about their operational practices and the philosophy behind them; today's center, The Writing Center at Mississippi State, has very generously shared a great deal of information that not only offers other centers the opportunity to think critically about their own operational practices but about why those choices were made. AXIS would like to thank Stacy Kastner, Rich Raymond, Kayleigh Few and Sava Kolev for their cooperation. 

This week I received another reminder that there is very little in this hyperconnected world of ours that doesn’t eventually figure in an encounter between writer and writing center consultant. The writing center is the kind of place where a consultation devoted to lamb kebab and the mechanics of writing ends up also being about the difficult, hazardous aspects of human sociality.

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.