A Refusable Future

Conference on College Composition and Communication (1949-2026)

Update: Just hopping back into edit to confirm that NCTE has indeed voted to dissolve our professional organization. From their email: “earlier today the Executive Committee of NCTE made the difficult decision to de-charter its special topics conference CCCC. To clarify, today’s decision to de-charter does not mean that NCTE has altered its commitment to supporting teachers at the college and university level.”

I’m not sure what level of catastrophe would need to occur to qualify as “altering” if erasing an entire organization doesn’t mean that their commitment has been altered, but there we are. RIP.

Welp. I certainly didn’t expect to be writing this particular post.

You may recall that, a few months back, I shared a talk that I’d delivered at my field’s annual gathering, the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC). As I mentioned at the time, it was the first time in nearly 10 years that I’d attended our annual convention. Part of that hiatus was due to personal health, part to COVID, and the rest due to the particular stage in my career where I find myself. To my pleasant surprise, I enjoyed myself, and had already worked with some colleagues to propose a session for next year’s conference in Milwaukee¹.

Photo by Mohammad Mardani on Unsplash

Imagine my surprise then, when I checked my Facebook feed today to find it ablaze with posts about the fact that CCCC, the flagship organization for our discipline and the host of our discipline’s annual convention, was about to be “dissolved” by its parent organization, the National Council for Teachers of English (NCTE)². They’re apparently on the verge of flushing away disciplinary infrastructure that has been in place for more than 70 years.

I’m only vaguely interested in our organization’s history, so rather than try to reconstruct it here, this is from a colleague of mine:

When John Gerber and others formed CCCC in Chicago in 1949, they wanted a space for college writing teachers to grow and share their experiences in order to build a profession. They recognized that NCTE served K-12 teachers well but that college teaching was increasingly complex from a socioeconomic and logistical standpoint, and that innovation and fellowship amongst its teachers necessitated a separate group. Gerber and others grew this into a journal and yearly conference, and down the road, CCCC blossomed in membership, leading to a book series and full set of professional committees, task forces, initiatives. For thousands of scholars of writing and teachers of writing in two and four year colleges, CCCC has been a professional home and community in good times and in bad. With one executive stroke, that is now all gone.

Although CCCC does technically lie within the purview of NCTE, there are thousands of people, if not tens of thousands, whose membership was channeled solely through the opportunities and infrastructure provided by the former. I can’t begin to list the numerous ways that CCCC has provided the conditions of possibility for the emergence of rhetoric and writing studies in this country. There are plenty of high profile examples of this: the annual conference, our field’s flagship journal, core intellectual and pedagogical resources. More importantly, it has served as the organizational backdrop alongside which our discipline has developed for longer than I’ve been alive. I’ve spent the past few hours trying to imagine an analogy for this experience, and largely failed. It’s a bit like hearing that the President has decided, by executive order, that the state you’re living in is no longer part of the US. It doesn’t erase your day-to-day existence, but all of the sudden, you’d no longer be considered an American³.

What happened?

I wasted more time on social media today than I’d really planned, but two themes emerged, one long-term and one more obviously immediate.

The long-term problem with the organization is that it has been struggling financially, and honestly, I don’t know enough about its budgetary circumstances to speak with much precision about this. However, I will say that this is something I’ve written about a few times over the years (and in fact, it was a glancing theme in my talk this year). The primary income for the organization, as I understand it, came from membership dues and conference attendance. For very obvious reasons, a 2-3 year pause⁴ in the latter was almost certainly devastating in that regard, and I think that their ability to recover from that shock has been limited.

As with newspapers, restaurants, retail stores, etc., there’s a broader problem with any business whose model depends largely on the physical world. Professional organizations of any stripe that depend on physical attendance have experienced these sorts of problems. And they’re really ill-equipped to recover. If you own a restaurant or bookstore, for instance, and close it for a year, you can’t make up that budget shortfall by doubling your “normal” traffic the next year. Your budget already assumes traffic at close to capacity—there’s nowhere to go beyond that capacity, outside of raising prices (and possibly reducing traffic), cutting costs, etc. Most physical businesses are low-margin, shock-vulnerable operations.

This is the point that I’ve written about and spoken about with a number of colleagues. The very design of the organization locked it into that context, partly due to its status as a subsidiary, partly due to the designed turnover of its leadership, and partly due to the way that the broader membership was insulated from organizational decision-making. CCCC has had dozens of chances during my career to take a more active role in re-shaping their practices for a digital era⁵, diversifying its budget profile in the process, and it failed to do so. That profile made sense for decades, until it didn’t (and doesn’t). They have done an admirable job of keeping those membership dues reasonable, and making the organization accessible to graduate students, but from a member’s perspective, there are two primary benefits to those fees: reduced conference registration fees and an annual subscription to our field’s flagship journal. The latter has been available digitally through most institutions’ libraries for years and years now; if the former is cancelled, or if you decide to no longer attend the conference, you’re just lighting those fees on fire each year⁶.

Even though my personal feeling is that CCCC has not done nearly enough to evolve alongside the discipline, it would be hypocritical of me to suggest that the organization deserves this. The conference provides our discipline with a vitally important sense of presence, expansion, and ritual, the very values that I wrote about earlier this week. Whatever its flaws, CCCC is responsible for the sense of community that I feel with colleagues across the country.

But CCCC’s financial predicament is not the full story, nor even the most important part of it.

So what really happened?

This account comes from someone who was in the room, an officer of CCCC who “was summoned to a 30-minute meeting with the Executive Director.”

We were told CCCC would be dissolved and its membership absorbed into the NCTE College section. We were told we’d be appointed to the Task Force assigned to that work. We were told that due to the culture of CCCC, they thought we jeopardized their non-profit status.

And there it is.

It’s hard to know whether this decision is based upon specific communication from the government or a matter of anticipatory obedience, but it seems that the end result is the same. Institutions across higher education have been treated to a long series of ransomware attacks by the mad king; whether this attack is self-inflicted or not, it feels of a piece with the past year and a half.

If you visit the NCTE website, one of the six membership benefits that they promote is access to the resources and position statements collected at its Intellectual Freedom Center. I’m not sure how much longer it will be available, given how its culture (resisting censorship, promoting antiracist pedagogy, standing behind curricula that deal with sensitive and complex topics⁷) appears to conflict with the executive board’s perception of its non-profit status. But perhaps the website will remain intact for a while longer, right up until it becomes awkward not to brick it. One can only hope. In the meantime, if they do decide to “dissolve” a 78-year-old organization because they disapprove of its “culture,” the message that it will send to their other divisions will be loud and clear. It’s difficult for me to imagine my colleagues feeling any amount of trust or loyalty on behalf of NCTE, regardless of how tomorrow’s vote turns out. No matter what happens, this feels like the end of an era.

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This episode came out of the blue—I’d already begun another post about some of my preparatory reading for the fall. So I’ll be returning to that, and keeping my eye on Facebook over the next couple of days. More soon.

1. The theme of that conference was to be “Design Writing Futures,” and our panel planned its talks around the idea of imagining what our intellectual descendants would find productive from the current era of writing scholarship. I wanted us to model our thinking in the style of Adrian Hon’s delightful A New History of the Future in 100 Objects. Our panel, assuming that it would have survived the review process, was called “Notes Toward a Usable Future.”

2. There is some discussion that this action cannot be taken without the approval and vote of the NCTE’s full executive board, and that this vote has not yet happened, but by the time you read this, the vote may have taken place. At the very least, CCCC officers have already been informed of NCTE’s intent to dissolve it.

3. I know, I know, don’t give him any ideas…

4. Again, not my wheelhouse, but while the conference was canceled one year, and the next two were conducted online. If this year’s was any indication, the conference has struggled to return to pre-pandemic levels of attendance.

5. Full disclosure: I have been involved in some of those aborted efforts. I received very little organizational support, and in one particular instance was treated so disrespectfully (and cruelly, imo) by employees of the organization that I made the decision a long time to no longer support CCCC personally. However, I still believe that it has been a vital presence in the field.

6. I’m being a little unfair here, I know. There is much more to the organization than one conference and one journal, but at the same time, I’m not being that unfair with this characterization.

7. For example, “race and racism, political and civil unrest, LGBTQIA+ peoples’ experiences and struggles, the upcoming presidential election, pandemic vaccination policies, reproductive rights, and other current and complex topics.”