Salt Lake Community College’s Community Writing Center will shut its doors at the Main Library next summer, following cuts made by the school.
The writing center offers coaching, workshops and writing groups. It also partners with youth writers, senior centers and the Salt Lake County jail.
“The idea was that higher education has so many resources to share with the community that we wanted to provide ways for the community to access some of those resources in ways that were different than traditional courses,” said Tif Rousculp, director and founder of the writing center.
And she said it was groundbreaking.
“In terms of partnering an institution of higher education with a community entity in a long-term partnership that actually had a physical space that was serving the community, yes, this is the first one,” she said.
Earlier this year, the Legislature set aside $60 million from Utah’s eight degree-granting institutions. To earn the money back, schools had to demonstrate that they would cut certain programs and put that money toward other, higher-performing ones. According to SLCC’s strategic reinvestment plan, closing the writing center will save the school $210,435.
SLCC will not cut funds from its Student Writing and Reading Center, which provides services to all registered SLCC students.
Peta Owens-Liston, assistant director of public relations at SLCC, said the school had to prioritize instruction and programs that attract and support student enrollment and success.
“The school took a close look at expenses that were not directly related to student services and student success, and although these were difficult decisions, that's what ultimately led to no longer being able to fund the Community Writing Center,” she said.
The center will shut down just a few months shy of its 25th anniversary.
Writers of all backgrounds and ages have used the center, Rousculp said. Since its launch, she estimates they’ve conducted nearly 15,000 writing coaching sessions, published 4,000 pages of writing, and in the last two years, worked with 250 individual authors.
Besides writing services, it also offers a sense of camaraderie for its writers.
Jennie Turner, who uses the pen name Will Turner for her published work, said she found her community there in a time when everyone seems divided and isolated.
“In the middle of the loneliness epidemic, I'm very sad to see them go,” she said. “I think we're truly going to be worse without it.”
Turner has a degree in vocal performance and business and is now pursuing an MBA in technology commercialization at Westminster University. She also takes undergraduate astrophysics classes at SLCC. She said there is no STEM without writing.
“If you can't read or write, then you can't do math. You just can't do math. If you don't know how to write, you cannot do science. You cannot do grant proposals. You cannot become a lawyer. You cannot become an astronaut. You cannot become an engineer,” she said. “This is going to hurt STEM, and this is going to hurt everybody.”
The writing center has no barriers to entry, which Turner called a rarity in American society. She said, other educational institutions are inaccessible to many.
Sarah Doepner went to the center to get feedback on some creative writing. She echoed that one of the bigger losses that will come from the writing center’s closure is the chance for anyone, regardless of economic status, background or education, to write and get work published.
“In a state like ours, where legacy and history and ancestry are so important, I think it's really a nice idea to have these opportunities to publish your ideas and your work so that future generations can look at them and say, ‘Oh, you know, that was my grandmother, or that was my uncle,’” she said.
There’s some hope that parts of the writing center will live on in other places, but there’s no guarantee.
Turner said there’s nothing else out there like it, and she would love to see it come back in the future, but for now, she will be grieving a pillar of the community.
Rousculp doesn’t know whether some of the services, like the youth writing programs and coaching, could be given a new home in the city, but she is trying to create archives of published work and resources for the public to continue to use.
“The Community Writing Center has been a very important expression of the college's commitment to the larger community that it serves, and it has demonstrated that education is for everybody in the community.”
