When Christa Ingabire ’24 arrived on the Hill from Burundi as a first-year, her first written assignment was a paper on utilitarianism. Like the rest of her class, she visited the Writing Center. “I had really good ideas,” she recalls, “but I knew I had grammar mistakes.” However, her tutor’s only feedback was that “everything’s fine,” says Ingabire. “I knew that obviously not everything was fine, [as English] is not my first language and this was my first paper in English.” Unsatisfied, she turned to the English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) program and made an appointment with former Program Director Barbara Britt-Hysell. Ingabire spent three hours with Hysell and learned there that “80% of [her] essay was actually mistakes.”
Hysell retired in June 2021 after seventeen years at Hamilton, and ESOL has since been discontinued in her absence. Today, the Writing Center and the Oral Communication Center (OCC), led respectively by Directors Jennifer Ambrose and Amy Gaffney, offer the only source of multilingual support. In Fall 2021, Alex Hanson joined them as Multilingual Student Support Coordinator and Assistant Director to the Writing Center and OCC. The Dean of Students Office is also in the final stages of hiring a new Dean of International Student Services.
Despite these additions, multilingual international students have expressed frustration about the discontinuation of the ESOL program. For Lebanese international student and former International Cultural Association (ICA) president Maroun Mezher ’23, ESOL was “the only place where we actually felt comfortable being internationals without putting any filters on, really. And that’s just gone. There’s nothing that replaced it.”
Mezher adds that “the whole point behind ESOL was 70% the social aspect and 30% the academic part of it.” By virtue of Hysell’s students being predominantly international students, ESOL had become the international student social space. After his first year, Ghanaian international student Christopher Akuleme ’23 no longer used ESOL for papers, but “to broaden the network of other international students that I knew,” he says. Chiara Bondi ’22, an Italian and Spanish international student, adds that “Ms. Hysell always made sure that the international students had somewhere to be,” which was Hysell’s office, formerly in KJ across from the OCC. To them, with ESOL gone, so too is the international student social space.
Official & Unofficial Roles of ESOL
The ESOL program was established in 2004 as an academic multilingual resource center. It provided two non-required courses — ESOL 101W: American Academic Essay and ESOL 102W: Etymology of American Social Movements. In ESOL 101W, Hysell taught basic conventions and processes of American academic writing, which Bondi valued because she says she had “no idea how to write a college paper in English.” ESOL 102W invited different lecturers from various departments to discuss critical American social movements, which contextualized “obvious” American knowledge for Bondi. ESOL also offered academic tutoring from Hysell and her professional tutors. Many multilingual international students used it extensively.
Hysell’s interactions with students extended beyond ESOL. Akuleme ’23 says that his and many other international students’ “first sense of community here” were the dinner parties and cookouts Hysell hosted at her house. Her students call it “Casa de Hysell.” International students lived with her, spent breaks with her and some stayed with her for some time after they graduated. Hysell says that “anything anybody needed, I would just say yes…that’s what the kids liked,” she underscores, “that I had their backs… from taking kids to the hospital, to the airport, to lawyers, everything.”
Lack of Respect/Support for ESOL
Going to ESOL “was a very clear ‘I am not from here’ sign,” Bondi admits.
To Chinese international student Lesley Lu ’23, the student body assumes that everyone’s first or preferred language is English, and being vocal about ESOL “finally exposes your identity” to native English-speaking, American peers. Hysell also says that some professors had “less respect for me” due to her seemingly unlimited availability to her students. “Professors would say, ‘Oh, Britt, she’s just so sweet. She’s like everybody’s mother’… I’m a professional instructor.” Hysell would respond, “I’m just a compassionate person.” She contends that the lack of respect some faculty had for her resulted in a disrespect for ESOL as a whole. For many multilingual international students and much of the Hamilton community, Hysell and ESOL were fundamentally tied.
At the same time, the need for Hysell’s exceeding support felt exacerbated by the fact that Assistant Dean of Students for International Students and Accessibility Allen Harrison had a dual responsibility. As Associate Dean of Students for International Students and for Accessibility, he is responsible for both international students and students with accessibility needs. The nature of his two responsibilities meant that he had little capacity to support ESOL. Dean Harrison says himself that he wore “two very, very big hats… I really don’t have any input into ESOL or multilingual operations on our campus.” Keshav Rai ’23, an international student from India and the U.K., recalls that Hysell often had to “pick up his slack in her little half-side of the ESOL department, too.”
External Review and Hysell Retires
In Fall 2020, ESOL underwent external review. External reviews are routine for resource centers and offer an “objective view,” Hanson states, which Gaffney explains as taking “a holistic look… of what this resource or program is, what they do, what they offer, who they serve, what resources they have, what resources they want.” This review was conducted by individuals unaffiliated with Hamilton College so they are “not invested in any one particular outcome,” said Gaffney. Though its findings are not publicly available, Gaffney says that it prompted a “transition to a different model.”
Hysell was displeased with how the review was conducted. Hamilton, because it had ESOL, was the only NESCAC school with a separate program for multilingual writers. The two external reviewers were from other NESCAC schools, and though they allegedly sang praises about ESOL to Hysell directly, she says these praises were absent in the actual review.
The Spectator
was unable to access a copy of this review.
Hysell questions whether the external reviewers ever read her annual reports. “They didn’t come out with a firm statement saying this program should continue,” she notes. The “wheels were already turning” for ESOL’s dissolution before her retirement, Hysell adds, and she wonders why “the directors [felt] it necessary to replace rather than collaborate with the ESOL program” following the review.
When any position opens, “there’s not necessarily a guarantee that it’s going to get replaced one-to-one,” says Gaffney. According to Associate Professor of German and Russian Languages and Literatures (Russian) John Bartle, the ESOL Program Committee recommended that her position be renewed. Bartle is a member of this committee. Tunisian international student Yassine Dhouib ’24 thought the search for Hysell’s successor would be unrealistic. “There’ll always be that person who was extra gentle, extra nice. You wish everyone was like that but I don’t think it’s even structurally possible,” Dhouib says. Gaffney states that the administration decided not to replace Hysell directly, but to “move the academic support to fall under the two existing centers… and hire someone whose expertise is specifically in supporting multilingual students, which is Alex Hanson.”
Transitioning Multilingual Support to the Writing Center and OCC
Transitions away from ESOL began in Summer 2021 when Hanson added a new multilingual training session into the Writing Center and OCC tutors’ general training. According to Writing Center tutor Cass Adler ’24, the multilingual training was only “around an hour, an hour and a half” of the multi-day general training. Bondi, an OCC tutor, and Writing Center tutor Grace Goldberg ’24 gave the same estimate. The new training instructed tutors to “be comfortable in giving [a] direct answer to multilingual students’ questions,” says Hanson. Writing Center tutors discussed sample papers, and OCC tutors discussed student presentation videos. Goldberg remembers a second, two-hour long presentation on Sept. 28 concerning moreso “the specific things to do in specific circumstances.”
However, student tutors still struggle to offer direct answers. “Tutors don’t want to offend anyone,’’ says Bondi. “I don’t want to tell people ‘your accent is too thick’ or ‘your grammar is not good,’’’ but “when you’re presenting your thesis,” she adds, “professors might actually grade you on grammatical correctness.’’ “What am I supposed to cater to,” Adler asks, when “professors often look for something much more like what a native English speaker would write, but I personally don’t want to change their voice?”
Hanson’s approach to training is “adequate” for Adler in that the Writing Center “isn’t really for tutoring one particular student from the beginning to the end of their years at Hamilton.” Yet, Adler, Bondi and Goldberg want more training, and because tutors like Bondi feel “a lot of fear” in giving direct answers, multilingual international students have widely mixed experiences and opinions on the centers’ academic credibility.
Additionally, while ESOL’s multilingual tutoring responsibilities moved to the Writing Center and the OCC, there is no substitute for courses ESOL used to offer. “If [those classes] were under literally any other department,” Bondi argues, “so many more students would take it. But because it was specifically under ESOL, it was completely neglected.” Professor Bartle, previous instructor of ESOL 102 from 2010–2014, says that the loss of these courses is “what to me is the saddest.” As far as he knows, no one intends to continue teaching them. “They’ll brag about writing,” Hysell adds, “but they’re not teaching.”
Student Experiences with ESOL, Writing Center and OCC
Professor Bartle observed the depth and flexibility of ESOL tutoring, which could last “10 or 15 minutes working on a very specific issue… [to] two or three hours.” The Writing Center and OCC are more rigid: appointments are an hour long and students can only sign up for one appointment a day on TutorTrac during exam seasons “out of fairness to all students,” says Ambrose. Lu feels “the point” of the one-appointment-a-day rule was that “I shouldn’t go past their system and directly ask for help.” Chinese international student Raio Huang ’24 also finds it more efficient to work for a longer time with a tutor at ESOL than “a scattered amount of small pieces of time” through different appointments over several days. On the other hand, there are multilingual international students like Dhouib who have preferred the Writing Center and OCC because “those long meetings… would be too much for me,” says Dhouib.
Historically, ESOL employed up to six professional tutors, yet there were only two professional tutors in the program’s final two years. Dhouib feels that the plethora of student tutors is an advantage of the Writing Center and OCC. By alternating between many student tutors that each “brought something new to the table… I learned from different people who major in different things,” he says. Dhouib also values the probability that the tutor themselves took a class with the professor he is writing for. “Hysell’s tutoring was useful,” says Lu, “but she doesn’t know the specific subject you’re writing on. That’s all on you.”
For Gaffney and Ambrose, their tutors gain from tutoring students as well. “It makes tutors more well-rounded as students too,” Gaffney notes. She continues, “I have philosophy or classics or government majors who love that they know a bit about [other subjects] because they’ve tutored multiple appointments about them.” Student tutors get a “broader view” of the curriculum and the student community, and bring that into future appointments in a positive cycle.
Hysell disagrees with Gaffney’s sentiment: “it’s upsetting that they’re more concerned with their tutors than they are with the tutees.” She argues that to “give tutors experience” has no place as the focus of any academic program “in terms of equity.” “How many of them are going to become professional tutors,” Hysell asks, “the work of students is in jeopardy so that a peer tutor can have an experience working with a diverse, multilingual student?”
Even with the specificity that dozens of student tutors offer and their new multilingual training, many tutees still feel that their feedback is lacking. Not only did Mezher feel his Writing Center comments were not as “extensive” as Hysell’s, but they were “passive,” such as “‘don’t use this word,’ instead of ‘this isn’t the right way to present an argument.’” After Huang’s first OCC appointment, he knew they prioritized “trying to be polite” over “being helpful.” Lu, a Writing Center frequenter before and after ESOL’s dissolution, estimated that only 50% of Writing Center tutors gave her valuable advice. “That’s an optimistic estimate,” she adds.
Huang owes the unhelpful feedback to the social pressure of tutors themselves being students. “We see each other every day, so they try to be polite in that setting so we don’t be really awkward in the future,” says Huang. Mezher is also uncomfortable with student tutors because he feels they judge him “for my skills which are subpar to what they write.” For him, being the same age but with different English capabilities amplifies the disparity. “When I’m interacting with people my age and they tell me ‘don’t say that in English’ or ‘you have an accent’ daily for five years,” he wonders, “will the next person judge me and tell me something about my English? It’s a self-reinforcing mechanism… if I’m being judged for simple everyday conversation, what if I’m presenting something academic?” Hysell explains that within ESOL, “for many of the students, there’s that confidentiality that was there in our relationship. No judgment.”
Multilingual international students and Hysell alike also consider student tutors’ multilingual training inadequate. Ingabire has not revisited the Writing Center after its acquisition of multilingual support, maintaining that “a one hour training isn’t enough to replace ten years of experience” that professional tutors could offer. “They’re not qualified to be teaching the way international students should be taught,” says Hysell. “Why does a peer tutor have more value than a professional tutor?”
Though primarily reliant on student tutors, the Writing Center and OCC do enlist the expertise of Susan Goldberg, formerly one of ESOL’s twoprofessional tutors, to “create that continuity” for former ESOL frequenters, says Ambrose. However, Hysell notes that Goldberg is “not getting students,” even though, according to Hysell, “she’s got like two PhDs and she speaks like four languages.” Gaffney adds that Hanson offers her multilingual expertise in one-on-one tutoring sessions as well. Hanson works from her office, and Lu felt after working with Goldberg that she should also have a separate room as “acknowledgement” that her experience distinguishes her from student tutors. Goldberg has declined to comment.
Apart from Mezher’s poor Writing Center experience, his OCC experience was useful because Bondi was his tutor. Goldberg and ESOL’s former tutors are multilingual, but Mezher owes his positive experience to how Bondi understood his struggle with English both as an individual and a fellow international Hamilton student. Ambrose understands the importance of hiring multilingual student tutors; the Writing Center student tutor Handshake application states that it “encourage[s] applications from students who can read papers written in multiple languages.” According to the OCC’s consultant webpage, five of fourteen OCC tutors are multilingual and eight languages are covered, including English. The Writing Center’s number is not publicly available, but Goldberg ’24 estimates that four out of twenty-six tutors are multilingual.
Still, for a large proportion of multilingual international students, the Writing Center and OCC are entirely foreign places. Chinese international student Athenia Li ’24 is one of them, having never visited either. “I don’t even know what OCC does,” she admits, nor what services they offer. Ingabire, though having used the Writing Center once, is similarly confused about the OCC: “what’s the purpose of that? When should we come in? Is it only for homework? Can I just come and speak?” Ambrose, knowing that ESOL students were often unsure about using the Writing Center or the OCC, hopes that with multilingual tutoring moving fully under the two centers, students will have “less confusion about where to go.” But even to students like Li who also did not use ESOL in the past, the Writing Center and OCC were never visible options to them. “Either I’m just ignorant,” Li says, or “or they just assume that [we] know.”
Looking to the future, Hanson is taking new steps to increase multilingual resources, including launching a virtual speaker series of multilingual experts. By working to support faculty and student tutors, Hanson aims to create “institutional change” for multilingual instruction rather than it being “designated to one person.” Akuleme, among other international students Hanson reached out to in preparation for her position, can tell “she cares a lot about us.” But Hanson, Gaffney and Ambrose can only operate and enact change in the academic sphere. “I’m not here to help with the social support piece of it,” Hanson explains, because it “falls under the Dean of International Students.”
A Missing International Student Social Space
“The other piece” of the external review, says Gaffney, was that the Dean of Students Office would be hiring a full-time Dean of International Student Services by Fall 2022. Ambrose is keen on the new position working in tandem with the Writing Center and OCC. Instead of having “one office that was doing both academic support and a lot of social support [from Hysell]… and then half of an office in Allen Harrison… now there could be more support that exists in both of those areas,” she says. Dean Harrison believes the new hire will spur an “internationalization,” of Hamilton, turning the campus into an international student space by making it “more aware and understanding of international student needs on a broader scale.”
But while Dean Harrison, Gaffney and Ambrose are excited for the change, international students are pessimistic at this grand “internationalization” when they remember the limited role of the Dean of International Students from past experiences with Dean Harrison. Dean Harrison says that his office is “geared towards social, day-to-day living, advising students from a non-academic standpoint,” but Bondi claims the only social support she receives is “every once in a while, that email of ‘Hey! You good? Your taxes are due. Sign your I-20.’” “He’s a nice guy,” Huang agrees, “but he offers help in terms of legal issues — so like driver’s license, social security, I-20s, that kind of thing. But that’s pretty much it.”
Regina Johnson, who provides administrative support for Dean Harrison as Staff Assistant at the Dean Of Students Office, reiterates that hers and Dean Harrison’s are “not a social role.” As a result, knowing that their social support will fall to a position and office historically lacking in the very social support it is designated for, students are doubtful of any meaningful change to come from the new hire. “So,” Mezher says, “I don’t care where internationalization is going — where is our social space?”
“Part of the culture shift,” says Hanson of her academic role, is differentiating between multilingual and international students. Dean Harrison expresses a similar sentiment in regards to a social space for international students, believing that it “should much, much more come from an office like International Student Services than it should come from ESOL.” “Drawing that line,” as Gaffney understood it, “helped to make some of those distinctions a little cleaner.”
For better or worse, ESOL blurred that line. While Rai agrees that “on paper,” ESOL should not be the designated international student space, he explains that to the administration, “we’re always an afterthought. There’s no resource other than this imperfect one that’s skewed to internationals,” who are often both multilingual and international. Without ESOL or any administrative support, Mezher says, “everything’s gone.”
“But it is not such a bleak situation,” Akuleme believes, “there’s ICA.” The ICA, says Dhouib, is “the one organization making an effort to make sure the international community has at least someone to represent them.” Rai and Akuleme are both former ICA Treasurers, and Bondi and Mezher serve respectively as the current ICA Treasurer and Vice President. But Lu, Li and Huang all feel that the ICA has “no presence” on campus, and Rai believes there is still the need for an international student space equivalent to the Days-Massolo Center or the Afro-Latin Cultural Center. “If that’s something that needs to happen,” Johnson contends, “we need to hear from [ICA]. And hopefully they will take that step.” Mezher is confident the ICA will, but has no faith that the Hamilton administration will listen. “They were never responsive and I doubt they will be,” Mezher laments. “But in case that happens, then I could see international students being more reliant on the ICA as the new ESOL… But if not, then I don’t know.”
“We were ahead of our time,” Hysell maintains. “It could’ve gotten bigger, it could’ve done more.” But ultimately, multilingual international students know that ESOL will not return. Still, they remain cautiously hopeful that the resources ESOL provided will reappear in some form. For Bondi, “if money doesn’t go into the ESOL program but goes to providing those resources, I’m okay with that.” “I don’t really mind where it comes from either,” Akuleme admits, and Dhouib wants “resources, if not for me, for other students.” “Just give us a space,” asks Mezher, “That’s all we’re asking for. If you won’t bring back ESOL as it was and not give us the level of support that we used to have, at least give us a space to get back some social aspect of it.”
*Correction as of midnight on 03/11/2022: In the print version and previous online version of this article, Maroun Mezher ’23 and Lesley Lu ’23 were incorrectly listed as Class of 2024, and with the last name “Mehzer” instead of “Mezher.” The new online version has made the previously-listed corrections.*
