Author: ksuchor

Published on March 5, 2020

Vibrant organizations are those that respond to the needs of their community and adapt and change to grow with the times in which they exist. In 2019 the Conference on College Composition and Communication endeavored to do both, and the accomplishments outlined in this Year In Review illustrate these efforts.

Friday, March 13, 2020
1:00–2:00 p.m. ET

Watch the webinar recording

CCCC membership is required to access the recording of this webinar. Join now. You will need to log in to your CCCC/NCTE account and go to your Library. To view this video with closed captioning, hover over the bottom right of the video and click “CC” and “English.”

In this CCCC webinar, three faculty members—Justine Post (Ohio Northern University), Sybil Priebe (North Dakota State College of Science), and Stephanie West-Puckett (University of Rhode Island)—share their theory and strategies surrounding the most time-consuming and, arguably, important work we do with students: grading. How might we maximize the effectiveness of our labor and ensure that we are treating our students fairly at the same time? The first speaker will introduce a framework for understanding feedback as a cycle of interpretation, negotiation, and communication between instructors and students and will consider the role that students’ goals play in shaping their understanding of instructor feedback. The second speaker will explain how, after years of strict policies and a highly structured instructor-centric approach to assessment, she fell down a Twitter rabbit hole and came out the other side with a softened approach to grading. The third speaker looks at how four alternative assessment practices can help to promote a more capacious understanding of “good writing” in the writing classroom and will show participants how to integrate socially just approaches to assessment into their own contexts. An audience-driven Q&A with the speakers follows, facilitated by Salt Lake Community College professor and TYCA archivist Stephanie Maenhardt.

Share your learning on Twitter at #4Cchat.

Conference on College Composition and Communication
November 2019

The Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) is an organization committed to inclusive, equitable, and sustaining learning environments; our classrooms, departments, and campuses should strive to be spaces that nurture our professional growth and that make it possible for students and teachers to do their best work. The CCCC continuously strives to fulfill the goals and values of our mission statement to support “the agency, power, and potential of diverse communicators inside and outside of postsecondary classrooms.”

In cases where minoritized and marginalized teacher-scholars are threatened, harassed, or adversely targeted based on their linguistic, religious, gender, and/ or racial characteristics, inhibiting the fulfillment of their professional responsibilities, CCCC affirms that academic institutions have a responsibility to protect and support minoritized and marginalized faculty.

Protection and support of minoritized and marginalized faculty may be offered in the following ways:

• Public statements from institutional leadership on incidents of harassment, hostility, and violence. Such statements should acknowledge the incident and provide evidence-based reassurances of how the incident is being handled.
• Plans for the safety and security of the targeted individual, including but not limited to campus police or security escort when on campus, providing on-site security for classes, and other work-related functions
• Provisions for compensated time or alternative methods of fulfilling faculty professional responsibilities until the affected individual is able to return safely to their workplace
  • Arrangements to meet responsibilities for teaching assignments (for example, short-term or long-term online course instruction or coverage of class meetings), including distance technology options for mentoring and advising of undergraduate and graduate students, where applicable
  • Fiscal resources to ensure the individual is able to fulfill their expectations for research and publication, as appropriate, in order to meet the contractual obligations of the position, as well as desired levels of participation in professional activities
  • Options for completing or reassigning service and governance responsibilities, whether elected or appointed, including securing alternate representation
  • Documented support for either the continuation of administrative work, temporary release or reassignment of administrative work, or permanent release or reassignment of administrative work, as is appropriate to the individual case.
• When relevant, the extension of time on the faculty member’s tenure and promotion clock
• Fiscal and logistical resources for the targeted individual to access counseling and mental health care, including health care professionals outside of the university

Institutions also can look to and adapt their short-term and long-term leave policies for faculty who experience emergency and/or crisis situations in relation to threats of violence and violent acts against marginalized faculty. Likewise, institutions should ensure that any strategies for accommodating the affected faculty member’s workload do not disproportionately affect other potentially vulnerable faculty members.

These best practices reflect the principles outlined in the following organizational documents:

• CCCC Standards for Ethical Conduct Regarding Sexual Violence, Sexual Harassment, and Hostile Environments
• NCTE Statement on Anti-Racism to Support Teaching and Learning
• CCCC Mission Statement
• CWPA Position Statement on Bullying in the Workplace

This position statement may be printed, copied, and disseminated without permission from NCTE.

Conference on College Composition and Communication
November 2019

Executive Summary: This statement establishes principles for graduate student mentorship that is inclusive, equitable, sustained, and networked. These principles are intended for graduate faculty and program administrators in masters and doctoral programs in rhetoric and composition and related fields to help sustain robust mentorship and related initiatives (including redirecting resources; creating a culture of mentorship; encouraging curricular innovation; developing extracurricular panels or workshops; and provoking discussion among graduate faculty and students, among other efforts.)

Ethical mentorship¹ requires ongoing institutional and interpersonal efforts to move graduate students into, through, and beyond degree completion toward satisfactory job placement beyond or within the academy. The imperative for mentorship is especially urgent now in light of pervasive precarity within higher education including scarcity, contingency, overloads, corporatization, and labor exploitation (e.g., Bérubé, 2013; MLA Task Force, 2014). In these contexts especially, mentoring relationships can become flexible responses to students’ differentiated needs as well as a part of larger efforts to dismantle institutional biases and exploitative practices. Graduate faculty and administrators have a responsibility to engage in inclusive, differentiated, and collaborative mentorship with graduate students. We thus affirm the following principles for sustaining mentorship that is responsive to local conditions, needs, and individuals:

Make academic practice and conventions accessible: Graduate study necessitates that students take on new languages, discourses, epistemologies, and ways of being, and navigate unfamiliar and potentially hostile spaces and discourses. Each student, with their ranging prior experience and positionalities (e.g., neurodiverse, veteran, parent, working-class background, multilingual) will experience the culture(s) in their graduate program differently. To help make academic cultures explicit and accessible, mentors can:

Demystify practice: Explicitly address discourses, genres, research methods, and networking, especially with minority, first-generation, and/or historically underrepresented or marginalized students who may disproportionately labor to acclimate to and work within an institutional academic culture as a “foreign place with a different language” (Sinanan, 2016, p.156).

Demystify writing and research: Teach students to identify, acclimate to, and interrogate (with the possibility of resisting and transforming) academic discourses and practices. Graduate faculty should work to unpack and make available disciplinary ways of critically writing, researching, and publishing (Micciche with Carr, 2011; Brooks-Gillies et al., 2015).

Advocate for financial support: Advise on professional opportunities, like conference travel, mindful of students’ varying financial situations. Advocate in departments and programs for adequate or increased financial support for critical professionalization activity (e.g., conference travel, summer support, job market support).

Enact collaborative and networked mentorship: More than a one-to-one relationship alone, graduate students and mentors benefit from a networked approach. Complementing mentorship in students’ home departments, graduate mentors can encourage horizontal mentoring (VanHaitsma and Ceraso, 2017) and facilitate mentorship across their institution (and even in other institutions and the field) to help meet varying needs, intersectional positionalities, interests, and concerns. To practice networked mentoring, graduate mentors can:

Scaffold mentoring: Enact advising schemes which intentionally build mentoring relationships with multiple faculty and program stakeholders (e.g., assign students a first-year advisor, then assign a different second-year advisor before they select a dissertation or thesis director). Networked mentoring can also involve the expertise of various stakeholders, including alumni, university career centers, graduate school personnel, mental health professionals, faculty in other departments, field organizations, and so on.

Manage relationships: In co-advising situations graduate students should not be responsible for managing or resolving potential conflicts. Moreover, the labor and responsibility of mentorship should not be disproportionately placed on students themselves nor on the generosity of any individual mentor. It should not be assumed that certain students should be mentored by certain faculty, that mentoring is any single faculty member’s responsibility, or that mentoring is limited only to those sharing scholarly interests.

Practice mentoring as transformation: “Remaining wedded to outmoded systems, including a model of apprenticeship in higher education that reinforces the false assumption that professorship is the only meaningful career for humanities doctoral recipients, does a tremendous disservice to all individuals and organizations that benefit from humanistic perspectives” (Rogers, 2013, p. 21). More than apprenticeship, mentorship can take transformation as its paradigm, as new pathways to success embrace the diverse needs of contemporary graduate students and the worlds in which they live and work (see Smith, 2012; MLA Task Force, 2014). To enact mentorship as transformation, graduate mentors can:

Learn about mentees’ intentions: Those involved in the mentorship of graduate students should learn why each student has chosen to pursue graduate education and how to (re)imagine “the field” and its varied work in ways that exceed mentors’ own.

Learn about job markets: Graduate students and mentors should learn about the state of the academic job markets, including the casualization (i.e., the current climate of nontenure track and contingent labor) of the academic workforce. Mentors and graduate students should learn about resources for quality positions outside higher education, including careers in education, nonprofits, government, etc. Some resources include MLA’s Connected Academics initiative, Versatile PhD, or #Alt-Ac Academy.

Validate and help students prepare for diverse careers: Graduate students should be encouraged and validated for career aspirations, choices, and outcomes beyond (ever fewer) conventional academic tenure-track positions (MLA Task Force, 2014). Toward mentorship that imagines a rich range of postgraduation options, we recommend that mentors:

Avoid myths: Mentors should not invoke or imply damaging and unrealistic myths about what success on the (academic) job market must look like (e.g., that only R1 academic positions are desirable, that a national academic job search is the only way to secure satisfactory employment). Instead, faculty should work with graduate students to imagine myriad postdegree options and follow students’ leads on working to meet their goals (see also Miller, et al., 2015).

Share information: Mentors and students should share information about writing careers, academic job markets, and where program graduates go. Programs might consider tracking and making available information about student job placement after graduation (Rogers, 2013, p. 19) and/or build networks among recent graduates and current students for horizontal mentoring.

Embody commitments to inclusion and diversity through differentiated mentorship: Mentorship is, of course, never one-size-fits-all. Students coming from undergraduate and graduate work at minority serving institutions (for instance, a student of color entering a predominately white institution) may experience the academy as a “brave space,” a positioning which leaves them to take on additional emotional and mental labor as they give up a former condition in favor of a new way of seeing and understanding (Arao & Clemens, 2013). While all graduate students work to become socialized into their varied roles as graduate students (Golde, 1999), historically underrepresented and marginalized groups benefit from mentorship practices in and outside of the classroom (Okawa, 2002). Toward practicing inclusive and differentiated mentorship, mentors should:

Stand as an ally: To practice allyship (see Edwards; Patel) mentors can, to start, reflect on their own privileged positions and work to understand the experiences of those they’re allying themselves with; publicly identify their allyship efforts by marking their own and others’ positionalities of privilege, practice self-reflection, and “initiate the change toward personal, institutional, and societal justice and equality” (Kendall, 2003).

Rhetorically listen: Mentors should practice rhetorical listening, which “signifies a stance of openness that a person may choose to assume in relation to any person, text, or culture” and combats how whiteness may function as an invisible racial category that influences the lens through which the listener may hear certain voices (Ratcliffe, 2005).

Make and protect space: Mentors should never engage in exclusionary practices, such as using stereotypical language, engaging in microaggressions, or enacting privileged acts of socialization. Mentors should practice vigilance against and intolerance for implicit or explicit bias. In sum, mentors should make and protect spaces for all graduate student issues and concerns.

Efforts to enact a culture of equitable and accessible mentoring are in the interest of all stakeholders in higher education to realize a diverse future scholar population that will continue to enact change throughout our field and varied institutions.

¹Domains of mentorship include (but are not limited to) field knowledge; research practices; academic discourses and critical writing; classroom, tutoring, administration, and other work training and experience; networking; professional development (including conferences, publication, research grants, institutes, and so on); life-work balance; time-to-degree planning; as well as securing employment post-graduation in a range of possible settings, including positions in government, higher education, nonprofits, education, etc.

References and Further Resources

“#Alt-Ac Academy: a Media Commons Project.” #Alt-Ac Academy. http://mediacommons.org/alt-ac/

Ahmed, S. (2012). On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life.  Durham: Duke UP.

Arao, B., & Clemens, K. (2013). From safe spaces to brave spaces. The art of effective facilitation: Reflections from social justice educators, 135-150.

Bérubé, M. (2013, Feb. 18).  The humanities, unraveled. The Chronicle of Higher Education, https://www.chronicle.com/article/Humanities-Unraveled/137291/.

Brooks-Gillies, M., Garcia, E.G., Kim, S.H., Manthey, K., & Smith, T.G. (2015). Graduate reading and writing across the disciplines, introduction [Special Issue]. Across the Disciplines: A Journal of Language, Learning, and Academic Writing 12(3).  https://wac.colostate.edu/atd/graduate_wac/index.cfm

Eble, M.F., & Gallet, L. Lewis (2008). Stories of mentoring: Theory and praxis. Anderson: Parlor Press.

Edwards, K. (2006). Aspiring social justice ally development: A conceptual model. NASPA Journal 43(4), 39-60.

Golde, C. M. (1998). Beginning graduate school: Explaining first-year doctoral attrition. New Directions for Higher Education, 1998(101), 55-64. doi:10.1002/he.10105

Kendall, Frances E. (2003). How to be an ally if you are a person with privilege.  http://www.scn.org/friends/ally.html

Lopez, M. (n.d.) On mentoring first generation and graduate students of color. MLA Commons. https://clpc.mla.hcommons.org/on-mentoring-first-generation-and-graduate-students-of-color/

Micciche, L.R. with A. Carr (2011). Toward graduate-level writing instruction. CCC 62(3), 477-501.

Miller, S., Pereira, M., Rummell, K., Simon, K., & Walsh, R. (2015). Myth busting the job search. ADE Bulletin, 154, 77-85.

MLA Task Force on Doctoral Study in Modern Language and Literature. (2014). Report of the MLA Task Force on Doctoral Study in Modern Language and Literature. The Modern Language Association of America.. https://apps.mla.org/pdf/taskforcedocstudy2014.pdf

Okawa, G. Y. (2002). Diving for pearls : Mentoring as cultural and activist practice among academics of color. College Composition and Communication, 53(3), 507–532.

Patel, V.S. (2011). Moving toward an inclusive model of allyship for racial justice. The Vermont Connection 32, 78-88.

The Ph.D. Placement Project. (2013). The Ph.D. Placement Project. The Chronicle of Higher Education,  https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/phd/

Ratcliffe, K. (2005). Rhetorical listening: Identification, gender, whiteness. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Rogers, K. (2013). Humanities unbound: Supporting careers and scholarship beyond the tenure track. Scholarly Communication Institute, http://katinarogers.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Rogers_SCI_Survey_Report_09AUG13.pdf

Sinanan, A. (2016). The value and necessity of mentoring African American college students at PWIs. The Journal of Pan African Studies (Online), 9(8), 155-166.

Smith, S. (2012). At the crossroads: Transforming doctoral education in the humanities. ADE Bulletin 152, 7-16.

VanHaitsma, P., & Ceraso, S. (2017). “Making it” in the academy through horizontal mentoring.” Peitho, 19(2), 210-233. http://peitho.cwshrc.org/making-it-in-the-academy-through-horizontal-mentoring/

Wright, G., ed. (2016). The mentoring continuum: From graduate school through tenure. Syracuse: Graduate School Press Syracuse University.

This position statement may be printed, copied, and disseminated without permission from NCTE.

This year CCCC is piloting a mentorship initiative for graduate students who will be applying for jobs in the next cycle (2020-21). Volunteer mentors from among the CCCC membership will assist with the following:

• general consultation/discussion of career planning, the state of the market, interpreting job ad language
• feedback on letter and CV
• practice interview with feedback (via video or phone)
• practice interview with feedback (in person at the CCCC Convention in Milwaukee)
• follow-up communication

Because this is a new pilot initiative, we will be limiting the number of participants to 20, prioritizing first-come-first-served, student need, and inclusivity. Participants must be members of CCCC. If you’re interested in receiving mentoring, please fill out this survey form by October 18, 2019.

Thank you for considering the role of session chair the CCCC Annual Convention! The session chair’s role is an important one to ensuring that the Convention runs smoothly. These guidelines provide an overview for serving as a session chair.

Before the Convention

Contact the presenters in your assigned session and introduce yourself. You can access contact information by logging into the unique URL to your presenter portal.

Request outlines or papers and other presentation material from panelists so you can familiarize yourself with the presentations included on your panel prior to the Convention. Use this information to help develop introductions, transitions, and possible questions to use during the session.

Remind presenters to consider accessibility as they prepare their presentations (e.g., creating materials in accessible formats, ensuring text and images are large and easy to read from a distance, captioning all audio and video materials). Encourage them to visit the Composing Access; the site has multiple resources on preparing accessible presentations.

Encourage your panelists to make their materials available online prior to the Convention.

During the Session

Arrive early and connect with all panelists: confirm speaker order, double check pronunciation of names and introduction information, and review how the session will run. Determine how time signals will be given and how time limits will be handled.

Introduce the session. Provide the overall session title and, if needed, a brief overview of the session (e.g., the presentation order or the common topic or theme connecting all presentations). Name all presenters at the beginning of the session, but wait until it’s the presenter’s turn to speak before giving a full individual introduction. Remind audience members to hold their questions until the end to ensure all presenters get the full speaking time they were allotted and prepared for.

Introduce each speaker, including affiliation/title and the title of the presentation.

Keep time: no more than 12–15 minutes per presenter to allow a full 15 minutes (and ideally more) at the end of the session for Q&A and discussion.

As needed, assist with distribution of presenters’ print materials during the session.

If relevant, provide some closing remarks that will help initiate discussion during the Q&A period. Ideally, be prepared with a question or observation about each presenter’s work to ensure all presenters have a chance to participate in the post-presentation discussion.

If someone is employing an ASL interpreter in your session, be sure the interpreter is positioned in a clear, well-lit place up front.

Moderate the discussion: repeat audience members’ questions so the whole room can hear them; direct questions to the appropriate presenter(s); try to balance participation among audience members and presenters to the extent possible; and keep the discussion flowing.

When the session time is over, stop discussion and thank presenters. Encourage presenters and audience members to continue conversations outside the session room to allow the next group of presenters ample time to set up.

If possible, help facilitate post-presentation discussion and information dissemination by posting to social media about the session, by encouraging presenters to make their materials available online, by inviting continued discussion after the session, etc.

The diverse stories CCCC Documentarians craft about their experiences help answer the question “What is a conference experience?”

Why Participate?

We’re hoping the Documentarian experience will 

• help you make sense of your experiences at the 2025 CCCC Annual Convention in a more focused and purposeful way; 
• allow you to compose a story that will be circulated to others in your professional community–others who need to hear it;
• invite you to set goals for future participation; and
• allow your voice to contribute to growth in the Convention and in the field more broadly.

What Does a Documentarian Do?

Before the Convention

• Complete an instructional module and the demographic survey.

During the Convention

• Complete daily surveys that will be delivered to you each morning and evening of the conference.
• Document your experience as you move through your day.
• Possibly map your locations as you move through each day of the Convention. 
• Take notes on your experiences with people, panels, and events. 

After the Convention

• Complete a reflective survey within one week after the Convention.

How Can I Join?

Every year, you have the opportunity to express your interest when you submit a proposal for the CCCC Annual Convention. Those who commit to being Documentarians in advance have a spot on the CCCC program.

However, you can still join later! To do so, email documentarianscccc@gmail.com.

Purpose of Documentarians

We’re hoping to use this experiential data for future Convention  planning informed by a deeper understanding of varied, individual experiences—to learn, for example, 

• what aspects of the Convention hold value for (which) attendees,
• what kinds of social and professional interactions take place and what makes them meaningful or valuable, and
• how people interact with planned Convention events and virtual spaces and how they potentially make their own spaces in pursuit of Convention experiences they desire.

We may also share portions of the anonymized information reported in the surveys with others in the wider professional community.

Why is Documentary-Making Important?

Documentary-making is a methodology of forecasting learning—because emergent stories (such as stories about a Convention we have not yet finished attending) are representations of things that the documentary makers did not yet know when they began documenting their experiences. And given this approach to their making, documentary stories are stories of learning. Telling documentary stories of learning is a task of recollection: making selections from the many documents generated along the path to the learning identified in the documentary story. 

These evolving documentary stories are facilitated by acts of projection (prior to the experience) and collection (during the experience) directed at and by our knowledge of that future forensic act of recollection otherwise known as documentary storytelling (after the experience). 

We offer that the more that documentaries can be recollections of documented events, the more they can enable discoveries of developing experiential learning (see Lindquist and Halbritter, 2019).

Your work as a Documentarian will inform two sorts of documentary stories:  

1. The story of the world we have in common, as an aggregate of diverse experiences
2. The story of the world as you (yourself) experience it

Together, these stories comprise an archive of member experiences that can be used for learning about our field and Convention experiences.

History of the CCCC Documentarian Project

Inspired by the work of Documentarians for the Conference on Community Writing, the CCCC Documentarian Project took shape in 2019 in preparation for the 2020 Conference on College Composition and Communication Annual Convention. Project leads Julie Lindquist, Bree Straayer, and Bump Halbritter designed a reflective survey protocol for Documentarians to use to gather notes on their experiences across the Convention week. The data provided by these reflective surveys allows CCCC to “learn more about the needs and experiences of its members” (Lindquist et al. 1); through reflecting on their experiences and reviewing them in light of the whole data set, Documentarians craft their stories for the CCCC audience. 

In 2020, Documentarians reflected on their experiences during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, including during the week that CCCC was canceled. In 2021 and 2022, Documentarians explored their experiences during the all-online Convention events. In 2023 and 2024, Documentarians captured their experiences in Chicago and Spokane. The early work of the Documentarian project is captured in two volumes: Recollections from an Uncommon Time: 4C20 Documentarian Tales (NCTE / CCCC / WAC Clearinghouse, 2023) and Recollections from Our Common Places: 4C21–23 Documentarian Tales (NCTE / CCCC / WAC Clearinghouse, 2025). 

In 2025, Adrienne Jankens and Jennifer Grouling assumed facilitation of the Documentarian project.

2025 Documentarians

Lisa Bailey
Clarissa Codrington
Thais Rodrigues Cons
Sarah Dammeyer
John Paul Dela Rosa
Charles C. Grimm
Stephanie Hedge
Adrienne Jankens
Mirna Jimenez
Kayla Landers
Elizabeth Lopez
Quang Ly
Jenny McFadden
Donald Moore
Havva Zorluel Özer
Stephen Quigley
Cindy Ross
Max Sala
Lia Schuermann
Jennifer Grouling Snider
Evan Thomas
Katherine Tirabassi
Matthew Ussia
Nicole Guinot Varty
Nicole Weaver
Tom William

SJAC Mission Statement:

The Social Justice at the Convention (SJAC) Committee is committed to the principles of diversity, inclusion, equity, fairness, access, and equal representation in all aspects of our profession and in all the communities that we inhabit. We promote and advance these principles through education and activism at our annual convention: opposing racism and other forms of systemic oppression, providing forums for those whose voices have been silenced or marginalized, and promoting cultural change that will guarantee equal opportunities for all, regardless of race, gender, religion, sexuality, or national origin.

Committee Members

Gabrielle Kelenyi, Co-Chair (2024–2026)
Virginia Schwarz, Co-Chair (2024–2026)
2026 Co-Chair (Local Arrangements Chair)
Wyatt Paige Hermansen (2025–2028)
Kathleen Lyons (2025–2028)
Nicole Ramer (2021–2026)
Tiffany Lynn Wong (2025–2028)

Committee Charge

Social Justice at the Convention Committee (SJAC)

General Charge: Promotes and advances principles of diversity, inclusion, equity, fairness, access, and equal representation in all aspects of the profession and in all the communities that are inhabited through education and activism at the Annual Convention.

Responsibilities

• Works with the Associate Chair to understand their vision for the CCCC Annual Convention and to collaboratively outline a scope for the SJAC’s efforts at the convention.
• Collaborates with the Local Arrangements Committee Chair, CDICC, and CCCC Caucuses to develop social justice and local engagement activities that complement the convention theme.
• Promotes participation and engagement in SJAC-sponsored activities at the CCCC Annual Convention and supports an inclusive conference culture.
• Creates opportunities for CCCC attendees to connect with activist communities in convention cities.
• Sponsors an annual panel that features local activists and organizations.

Membership

• Members will serve three-year terms.
• Chair: Selects members in consultation with administrative committee chairs and is responsible for fulfilling or delegating its charges.
• Members: Assist Chair in fulfilling the responsibilities of its charges.

Social Justice at the Convention Case Study, Hazelwood, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (PDF)

To Whom It May Concern:

Earlier this year, the National Communication Association (NCA) changed its selection and nomination processes for its Distinguished Scholars program, which created controversy over whether the organization was responding properly to its recent commitment to encouraging diversity and equity among its members and in the organization. After a series of editorials and open letters from NCA members and many others that reveal a divide between those who feel that encouraging diversity in organizations and their most prestigious awards amounts to lessening the rigor and value of such organizations and awards, and those who reject such an either-or logic, the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) felt it necessary to offer a letter of support, encouraging NCA to continue a robust commitment to diversity and equity in its organization, which only makes it stronger and more relevant in global communication studies.

The Conference on College Composition and Communication supports NCA in its commitment to diversity and equity as reflected in its recent decision to change the selection process of its Distinguished Scholars program. CCCC, however, rejects the recent editorial written by Martin J. Medhurst, editor of Rhetoric and Public Affairs, and subsequent statements made by Distinguished Scholars, which draw a false dichotomy between “merit” and “diversity.” CCCC unanimously denounces the logic of these statements, which at their core assert that the rigor and integrity of rhetorical studies suffer under equity initiatives. These remarks demonstrate how entrenched inequity and injustice are in the academy, and how some scholars in the field and in positions of power remain possessively invested in structural and institutional systems of exclusion and oppression.

The Conference on College Composition and Communication Executive Committee