Faculty and campus leaders are regularly confronted with questions about beginning, growing, and sustaining writing-related programming and pedagogy, especially in the midst of uncertain political and educational futures. In this keynote, Christopher Basgier will suggest that a university’s culture of writing can thrive when its stakeholders adopt pluralism as a central value and mode of operation. Successful writing across the curriculum (WAC) programs must account for plural people (e.g., faculty, students, staff, and administrators) with the shared responsibility to teach and learn plural disciplines (e.g., humanities, social sciences, STEM, business, and medicine) that use plural kinds of writing (e.g., historical narratives, laboratory reports, slide decks, and ePortfolios) to accomplish plural ends (e.g., knowledge building, problem-solving, performance, or social change).

In the face of such plurality, an institution that employs a single mode of intervention (e.g., a writing-intensive course requirement or a weeklong summer workshop alone) may struggle to sustain strong writing programming across campus. Basgier will illustrate how an implicit value of pluralism has informed his program’s work to integrate and sustain WAC at Auburn University through multiple, complementary initiatives focused on faculty development, departmental collaboration, and university-wide assessment. He will conclude by suggesting that such varied approaches to campus-wide efforts around writing instruction and support can also bolster an effective response to generative artificial intelligence, which threatens to reduce the abundant pluralism of writing to the merely statistically probabilistic if not engaged critically.

Write@UGA 2025 is generously sponsored by the following units: Department of English's Ballew Lecture Fund, Center for Teaching and Learning, Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, Office of Instruction, Terry College of Business, and Willis Center for Writing.