Decision from NCTE Executive Committee

[ten grrl]

The following is a message to all NCTE members from the NCTE Executive Committee. The NCTE Executive Committee acknowledges the communications it has received from many members of the community regarding CCCC. For many years, the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) played a critical role in serving the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and its mission. In recent years, however, CCCC has struggled with its fiscal sustainability, declining participation, and governance challenges. As a result, 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. This is exemplified by the fact that the NCTE College Section is thriving.  The process in making this decision spanned several years, with attempts to work collaboratively with CCCC’s executive committees across multiple iterations. While the organization appreciates the years of collaboration with CCCC, after deep evaluation and thoughtful consideration, the Executive Committee concluded this step was necessary to more effectively serve the college English and writing and composition community and NCTE membership as a whole. Although this has been a very difficult decision, we are excited about the future. This change will allow us to provide better support to the college English and writing and composition community. In the coming days and weeks, we will be working hard to make this transition as smooth as possible. We thank CCCC, its leaders, and its members for its many years of contributions and look forward to continuing to involve the composition, rhetoric, and writing communities as we move forward. NCTE remains devoted to improving the teaching and learning of English and the language arts at all levels of education. As future planning takes place, NCTE will communicate updates. A transition team focused on supporting composition, rhetoric, and writing studies will be named by the NCTE Executive Committee imminently.

[Seth Kahn]

I know I'm not the first or only person who has responded to this by requesting NCTE cancel my membership. I would recommend that people who don't want to be NCTE members anymore do the same, even though they're not likely to comply. Every day they refuse will make it easier to make the point that I wouldn't trust the current NCTE leadership team to make decisions about what they should feed themselves for breakfast, much less how to spend millions of dollars that we give them. 

They can't just make a decision this reckless and expect thousands of us to say, "Well, sure, OK, just keep our money while we all try to figure out how to replace what you just stole from us." 

--Seth

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The Crowdsourced CCCC-L FAQ is available at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VhmRnYV_X0bDW6RYT9ka68WbMzCqPhhVYuPd_e_hNGg/edit?usp=sharing
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Seth Kahn (he/him/his)
Department of English
West Chester University of PA

"Let's save pessimism for better times." --Eduardo Galleano

[ten grrl]

Here's a model from Timothy Oleksiak, Shared with permission:

Here's what I just sent the Membership department.


Hello. I'm sure the person who's reading this had nothing to do with the decision today by the NCTE Exec Committee to de-charter CCCC so I'm not going to rant at you, but I have no interest in being an NCTE member without CCCC.

My member number is XXXXXXX. If you need to prorate it for a month since I just renewed in late June, I can live with that although I'd ask you to consider the optics of that decision. Either way, I don't want to be a member of NCTE and I don't want the current leadership team to access to membership dues. Please refund as much as you can as quickly as possible.

Thanks in advance.