Introduction: Benchmarks in writing center scholarship

The "graying of the professoriate" has been a topic of interest for the past decade as higher education literature has pondered the demographics of an aging population of faculty members. With the retirements- Anticipated and accomplished-it behooves us to move the stories about writing center histories into the archives in a more formal manner. One would like to say that it will be helpful for those who follow the pioneers to understand how we got here from there so they can enjoy the "wisdom of the past." Would that it had been all wisdom. Fortunately, a good deal of the wisdom that has accumulated can be attributed to one writing center figure, Muriel Harris. When the Conference on College Composition and Communication honored Muriel Harris with its Exemplar Award at the 2000 convention, the organization merely affirmed what those working in the writing center profession have known for years: Muriel Harris has made profound contributions to our field in innumerable ways. When she published the first issue of the Writing Lab Newsletter in April 1977, she helped establish the basis of a new professional community and provided it with an important mechanism for cohesion. While writing centers had been in existence for a great many years before this-At the University of Iowa, for example, under the guidance of Lou Kelly-it was not until the creation of the Newsletter that writing center directors and staff had a national forum for regular publication and professional contact. Over the course of the next 25 years, Muriel Harris and the Newsletter have become two of the writing center community's most valuable resources. Together, they have confirmed writing center studies as a legitimate area of scholarly inquiry, given shape to a new field of study that has become increasingly sophisticated theoretically, educated hundreds of writing center professionals, and helped us to envision the nature of writing centers and the direction of writing center scholarship in the millennium to come. Had the Writing Lab Newsletter been Muriel Harris's only contribution to the field, it would have been noteworthy in itself; yet Professor Harris's contributions have gone far beyond this. Her regular publications in professional journals such as College English and College Composition and Communication, her innumerable book chapters, and a number of full-length texts-most notably Tutoring Writing: A Sourcebook for Writing Labs (1982), Teaching One-To-One: The Writing Conference (1986), and The Prentice Hall Reference Guide to Grammar and Usage (2003)-not only have kept writing center scholarship in the eye of the larger composition community, but they also have spoken about the work we do with theoretical incisiveness, invoking current research into collaborative learning, situated discourse communities, networks of power and authority, and technological literacy. In all these ways and more, Muriel Harris continues to be one of the most forward-Thinking and visionary members of the writing center community she helped to found nearly a quarter of a century ago. In honor of Muriel Harris, then, this text provides a critical perspective on current issues in the writing center field that have emerged, in part, as a result of Harris's research, scholarship, teaching, and service to the field. For the last thirty years, Harris has been working to expand the writing center community, to help define it, and to identify shared principles with others who work in the larger area of composition studies. For the most part this work has been successful. We, as writing center professionals, have convened at conferences, founded forums for publication, and established national and regional organizations. But we now face the critical question "What next?" as we prepare ourselves for the demands of the coming century and the institutional, demographic, and financial changes that it is likely to bring. It is an appropriate point to reflect on the past and envision the future and, in doing so, to acknowledge the contributions that Muriel Harris has made to the present state of the writing center "world." We offer this text, then, as both an overview of Muriel Harris's continuing legacy and as a general framework for the writing center research that is yet to come. The contributors to this volume offer explicit recognition of the role that Muriel Harris has played in the field's development and to the development of their own research agendas, but they also see that history as only a starting point from which to provide reflective, descriptive, and predictive looks at the field which Dr. Harris has helped to shape. Though it is hardly possible, even in a substantial book such as this, to enumerate the multiple ways, great and small, Muriel Harris has influenced writing center scholarship and practice, we would nevertheless like to suggest several that we feel are among the most pervasive and significant. Identifying these areas will serve a dual purpose for us here, giving us the opportunity not only to review (and honor) Harris's contributions to the field, but to introduce, in turn, each of the chapters that builds on those contributions.