Harvard’s decision to dismantle its Writing Center as an independent entity and to lay off its longtime director, Jane Rosenzweig, has sparked an unusual level of anger. Students, faculty, former tutors, and alums have protested a decision that might otherwise have slipped into the fog of administrative restructuring.
The controversy is about more than a single employee or even a single writing center. It raises a much larger question: What happens to human learning when artificial intelligence becomes very good at producing the very product students are supposed to struggle to produce on their own?
Harvard says it is consolidating the Writing Center rather than abolishing it. Writing tutors are expected to remain available, and the broader Harvard Writing Program will continue to teach first-year writing. Administrators have said that students will continue to receive writing guidance in the age of AI.
But critics see an important skill being lost. The Writing Center was built around one-on-one encounters in which tutors did more than correct grammar or polish sentences. They helped students clarify ideas, challenge assumptions, and determine what they wanted to say. Former tutors described the underlying principle simply: “Writing is thinking.”
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The cognitive threat is easy to describe. A student faces a blank screen. Thinking is hard. Writing is slow. Revision is frustrating. AI offers an escape hatch. Type a prompt, and the friction vanishes. ChatGPT can produce a competent essay in seconds. Yet friction is often where learning happens.
The solution, however, isn’t to pretend AI doesn’t exist. According to a Harvard Crimson survey, students already report using AI for a substantial share of their homework. Harvard itself provides access to major AI platforms and has developed educational resources for teaching with generative AI. The horse has left the barn. Closing the barn door isn’t an educational strategy. However, medicine’s relationship to AI offers a path forward.
The American Medical Association deliberately uses the term “augmented intelligence” to emphasize AI designed to enhance human intelligence rather than replace it. That distinction is increasingly evident in clinical practice. Ambient AI scribes, for example, can listen to physician-patient encounters and generate draft documentation. The physician remains central to the process, reviewing, editing, and finalizing the documentation. Technology handles clerical tasks, allowing the physician to focus more fully on the patient.
A multicenter quality-improvement study of 263 clinicians found that after 30 days of using an ambient AI scribe, clinicians reported less burnout, a lower documentation burden, and a greater ability to focus on patients. The technology did not make the physician unnecessary. Its value came partly from enabling the physician to be more present. That is the model higher education should consider.
Instead of dismantling the Writing Center, Harvard could reinvent it as a Center for Writing, Thinking, and AI. Students could bring not only drafts but also AI-generated drafts, prompts, revisions, and research summaries. Tutors could ask: Why did you accept this sentence? Why did you reject that one? Is this claim true? Has the chatbot hallucinated a citation? Which version sounds like you? What idea did the machine overlook? What happens when you argue against its answer?
Imagine a student asking AI to rewrite a paragraph, then meeting with a human tutor to compare the two versions. The important question would no longer be merely, “Which paragraph is better?” It would be, “Why?” That is true intellectual work, not unlike what critics of AI fear will be lost: the struggle to think one’s way toward an idea and to find the words to make it one’s own.
The Writing Center could become one of the best places on campus for teaching AI literacy because writing tutors already teach something AI cannot reliably provide: judgment. They can help students distinguish clarity from superficial fluency, evidence from confident fabrication, genuine insight from sophisticated-sounding clichés, and assistance from intellectual surrender. Most importantly, a human tutor can engage with a student as a developing person. A chatbot may help a student repeatedly, but it does not provide the same ongoing relationship with someone who recognizes intellectual habits, remembers past struggles, notices growth, and expects the student to improve over time.
Medicine understands this instinctively. A machine can summarize a clinical encounter, search the literature, identify patterns, draft a note, or suggest possibilities. But we should be extraordinarily cautious when efficiency is used to argue for eliminating the physician from the relationship. The same principle applies to education. AI should carry some of the load, not the student.
Harvard therefore faces a choice broader than whether a single administrative unit survives a restructuring. It can treat AI as a reason to spend less on human intellectual development, or it can recognize that increasingly powerful machines make human mentorship even more valuable.
The future of writing probably will not be a human-versus-artificial-intelligence contest. I hope the future of medicine will not be either. As machines become more capable, we must decide more deliberately which tasks to assign to them and which must remain with us.
Arthur Lazarus is a physician-author whose work spans narrative medicine, physician leadership, artificial intelligence, health care ethics, medical culture, and fiction. He has published more than 500 articles and essays across scientific journals, professional publications, and online platforms.
He is the author of numerous books on narrative medicine, AI in medicine, career development, and the changing moral landscape of health care, as well as fictional series including Rounds Never End, Sick and Systemic, and Real Medicine, Unreal Stories. His writing explores the forces reshaping modern medicine while preserving a central commitment to story, meaning, judgment, and the human relationship at the heart of care.
He shares updates on LinkedIn.
