This time, the news is coming from inside the house.
On Friday, July 24, twelve people on the National Council of Teachers of English’s Executive Committee voted to end the Conference on College Composition and Communication. This vote means ending the organization that articulated Students’ Right to their Own Language more than 50 years ago.
Emma Whitford has a good article on what happened. Whitford writes: “Melissa Ianetta, a now-former CCCC officer and executive director of writing and communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology, told Inside Higher Ed she first learned of NCTE’s plan to end the conference on Wednesday afternoon during a meeting with several NCTE officials. During the meeting, Ianetta and one other CCCC officer were told the “culture” of CCCC threatened NCTE’s nonprofit status.”
This news hit close to home. Before I was born, my grandmother was a member of NCTE. I worked for NCTE for five years as a part-time proofreader at the Urbana headquarters. I have been part of NCTE CCCC for 14 years.
I owe my career to CCCC. The first time I went on the academic job market, I did not do well. I was lucky to get one campus visit, and luckier still that I got one job offer. I loved that first job, but it was way far away from my family. The second time I went on the job market, I was the same person, with the same research agenda, the same approach to teaching, and the same lackluster interview skills as always. But I also had the CCCC dissertation award and an article in CCC. More people started giving me more chances. It is painful to think about how future people will not have that same lifeline.
When I received the CCCC Research Impact Award last year, it was another life-changing moment, and I thought, “I really need to appreciate this, because it probably won’t ever happen again.” I didn’t know the half of it!
The aim is to remove space, time, staffing, resources, and incentives for people to understand the politics of language and literacy. It won’t work, but in the short term, NCTE has succeeded in making people’s lives harder and more demeaning than they need to be.