Profiles of Writing in the College of Science and Writing in the College of Health and Human Sciences are published, based on interviews with faculty and administrators in the colleges. Profiles for all of the colleges are in production.

The Offices of University Life funds research on the writing experiences of non-native students across disciplines and a publication based on the research, Valuing Written Accents: Non-native Students Talk about Identity, Academic Writing, and Meeting Teachers' Expectations.

The Writing@Center newsletter goes online. The GM Review, a publication of exemplary student writing across disciplines, returns to its cross-disciplinary roots with faculty advisors from the WAC program and the writing center.

The Provost commits funding for a WAC assistant director. Susan Durham from the School of Nursing is appointed to that position for 2006-07.

Writing guides for ten different disciplines, produced by faculty in those disciplines, are now available on line.

Funding is put into the WAC budget to support two graduate assistant positions dedicated to tutoring at the Arlington and Prince William campuses. The GA positions are open to students in graduate programs across the university.

Student Writing awards are inaugurated. The WAC committee joins with faculty across disciplines to recognize outstanding undergraduate writers in the majors. Student winners are given a small monetary award and a letter of appreciation by the WAC Committee. See details by clicking here.

The WAC committee conducts its third review of WI syllabi and finds almost full compliance with the requirement.

The School of Management outfits a satellite writing center in Enterprise Hall, signaling their intention to make writing an important focus in their curriculum.

The university-wide "Celebration of Writing" recognizes the WAC and writing assessment efforts of faculty across the disciplines. Provost Stearns calls the WAC program "a tremendously important aspect of George Mason University" and praises faculty for their dedication to student writers in their disciplines. University president Alan Merten also expresses his appreciation and thanks.

The WAC-focused Writing Fellows program is piloted with course-based tutors assigned to faculty in six different disciplines, including an introductory history course taught by Provost Peter Stearns. The program is funded in spring 2003 under the umbrella of the Research Apprentice program in the Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE), signaling the shared teaching and learning goals of CTE and WAC.

Mason's WAC program is ranked among the top five writing in the disciplines programs in the country by U.S. News Best Colleges Issue. We are one of only a few public institutions on the list. The program continues to make this list every year up to the present time.

The cross-disciplinary Writing Assessment Group is formed in response to a State Council of Higher Education in Virginia (SCHEV) mandate to assess students' writing competence. The group's first step is to design and circulate a faculty survey on student writing to determine the kinds of writing students are being asked to do and faculty satisfaction with that writing. Holistic scoring workshops are held for faculty writing representatives from select departments to model a WI-course-embedded process for assessing the writing of their majors.

The Writing at Center newsletter gets a new look and becomes Writing@Center in keeping with the increasing importance of the internet in writing across the curriculum.

The WAC Committee completes its second assessment of WI syllabi to determine the degree of compliance with the requirement. Questions about writing are added to the Graduating Senior Survey and the Alumni Survey to gather data on students' perceptions of the extent to which their courses contributed to their growth as writers.

With grants from the Office of the Provost, the WAC Director begins work on a series of online writing guides in the disciplines. Click here to view these guides.

Twenty years' achievement of WAC at George Mason is recognized at a Provost's reception, attended by the Provost and University President, in Fall 1999. Chris Thaiss is singled out by the Provost for special recognition for his twenty-plus years of service. For other faculty members honored at the Provost's Reception, please click here.

CAS 390: Peer Tutoring in Writing in the Disciplines is approved, with the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) designation signaling its cross-disciplinary goals. For the first time, a highly select group of undergraduates have the opportunity to tutor alongside graduate students in the writing center.

The Linked Courses program becomes the Mason Topics Program, which offers first year students the opportunity to take two semesters of linked general education courses grouped into four different topics: American Experience, Global Village, Science, Technology, and Society, or Classical Presence. Join students interested in taking a sequence of popular courses on one of four topics: American Experience, Global Village, Science, Technology, and Society, or Classical Presence. Small writing-infused classes and out-of-the-classroom learning experiences are hallmarks of the program.

The WAC Program and the University Writing Center are joined in a single director, Terry Myers Zawacki. The College of Arts and Sciences Council votes that all courses meeting the general education requirement in literature will meet the same criteria as those for writing-intensive courses, and the CHSS dean approves new funding to reduce class sizes. English 302 (Advanced Composition), the Linked Courses Program, the Honors Program in General Education, and New Century College remain strong, separately directed components of WAC.

WAC at George Mason goes on the World Wide Web with the opening of the GMU WAC home page. For GMU undergraduates, writing is formally cross-curricular and interdisciplinary in the Honors Program in General Education (which succeeds PAGE in 1997), the Linked Courses Program, and New Century College. For GMU upper-division majors in all fields, the writing-intensive (WI) program is in its second year, with assessment of the new initiative being carried out by the University WAC Committee and the Office of Assessment.

The WI requirement is implemented for all undergraduate students, with 133 faculty from 55 degree programs participating in this first semester. By Spring 1996, more than 80 WI faculty had taken part in WAC workshops conducted by the director of the program and focused on assignment design and response to student writing. The WAC Committee begins to design assessment of the new venture.

Based on a feasibility study by the University WAC Committee, the Faculty Senate votes to reduce the WI requirement to "at least one course at the 300-level or above in the major." (The key finding of the study that had led to the reduction had been the lack of courses with enrollment sufficiently small to allow detailed feedback on writing by instructors.) The director and committee begin the task of working with all degree programs to launch the new requirement by Fall 1995.

Since 1988, the College of Arts and Sciences had been working to redesign its general education requirements toward more interdisciplinary courses. Though overall plans had yet to be approved by a majority of faculty, one part of the design, a writing-intensive cross-disciplinary first year course, had been piloted. In 1993, the design of this course was modified into a "linking" arrangement that became the Linked Courses Program. In most of the links, writing was carried out in each course and faculty coordinated their efforts. By Fall 1999, the Linked Courses Program included 30 sections of English 101 linked with courses in eight disciplines.

The Writing At Center newsletter, a collaboration between WAC and the university writing center, is launched as a vehicle for disseminating best practices in teaching with writing across the disciplines.

The Faculty Senate votes to require four writing-intensive courses for all undergraduates in addition to the six-hour composition requirement. The Provost's Office appoints a director-Chris Thaiss--and the Senate establishes a University WAC Committee made up of representatives from each undergraduate college. The director and committee are charged to design and implement the new program.

The Faculty Senate approves English 302 (Advanced Composition), a junior-level course, to fulfill the second three hours of the composition requirement, replacing a second first-year course. English 302 is to be taught in three versions: Humanities, Social Sciences, and Natural Sciences/Technology, related to students' majors. A fourth version, for business majors, is added in 1986.

The Plan for Alternative General Education (PAGE) receives a Funds for Excellence grant for 1982-1984 to implement a 45-hour interdisciplinary general education program for 200 or more new students each year. Over the next ten years, more than 175 faculty will learn ways to use and respond to student writing through PAGE faculty development workshops.

The NVWP, directed by Don Gallehr, receives the first two awards under the state's Funds for Excellence in Higher Education program. The WAC program, with Chris Thaiss' leadership, receives one of these grants to sponsor five-week summer institutes for faculty in the summers of 1980 and 1981. The NVWP founds a cross-disciplinary Writing Research Center with the second grant. Among results of the grants is the volume Writing Across the Curriculum: Essays and Reflections (Kendall/Hunt, 1983).

Under the leadership of the one-year-old Northern Virginia Writing Project (NVWP), located at GMU, the first series of WAC workshops is held, with funding from the deans of Arts and Sciences, Business, and Education. Speaker Robert Parker of Rutgers addresses the first workshop for sixteen faculty from nine disciplines. Speakers Elaine Maimon, Barbara Nodine, and Gail Hearn of Beaver College lead a second annual workshop in 1979.

National media spark widespread concern about a "literacy crisis" in the United States. GMU Faculty Senate forms a Literacy Task Force in response to complaints by faculty about poor writing skills. Among the recommendations is a call to begin workshops for faculty across disciplines in ways to use writing as a tool of teaching.