Category: Uncategorized

Application Deadline: October 10

Purpose: The Conference on College Composition and Communication sponsors the Scholars for the Dream Travel Award to encourage scholarship by historically underrepresented groups. This includes Black, Latinx, Asian, American Indian/Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, or other Pacific Islander scholars, regardless of citizenship status—persons whose presence and whose contributions are central to the full realization of our professional goals.

CCCC offers selected Scholars for the Dream Travel Award winners travel awards of $1,000 each and sponsors a reception for all award winners. Award winners will have the opportunity to work with career mentors who are CCCC members as part of the award.

Eligibility: If you are from an eligible group and an emerging scholar, you are eligible to apply. Ten Scholars for the Dream Travel Awards will be first-time presenters at CCCC. Up to ten additional awardees may be selected from CCCC members whose proposals have been accepted to the convention, who have presented at no more than three previous CCCC conventions, and who have not previously received a Scholars for the Dream Travel Award.

Award Criteria: The Awards Selection Committee considers originality of research, significance of pedagogical or theoretical contributions to the field, and potential for larger, subsequent projects. Award winners will be notified by early December.

The Awards Selection Committee considers originality of research, significance of pedagogical or theoretical contributions to the field, and potential for larger, subsequent projects. Specifically, the Selection Committee will consider the following:

1. The Problem. The presentation promises to describe a significant problem or issue, meeting one or more of these criteria:

• Timeliness: contributes to a current issue in rhetoric or composition studies.
• Theory: references a specific theoretical framework within rhetoric or composition studies, sharpening concept definitions or presenting alternative viewpoints.
• Research: provides exploration with new research techniques or creative use of known techniques; demonstrates and fills a research void; creates or improves an instrument for observing and analyzing research data.
• Pedagogy: relates specific, creative classroom practices to particular theoretical frames, demonstrating potential for general application (more than a demonstration of a particular personality’s successful pedagogy).

2. The Potential. Whether theory, research, or pedagogy, the presentation should hold promise for future exploration and investigation.

Award Specifics: If you are from a historically underrepresented group, if you are an emerging scholar, and if you would be presenting at CCCC, you may apply by submitting the materials outline below.

Your proposal will be reviewed by the Scholars for the Dream Travel Award Selection Committee. If your proposal is accepted and it meets criteria, you are eligible for a travel award.

Candidates for travel awards should submit an expanded, 3 to 5-page abstract and a completed Scholars for the Dream Eligibility Form (.docx) as a single PDF attachment by October 10, 2024, to the CCCC Liaison at cccc@ncte.org. (Note: You must be be from one or more of the historically underrepresented groups noted above.)

Award winners will be notified by early December.

Other Considerations: In the event that the CCCC Annual Convention moves to an online-only event with no in-person component, recipients will receive a complimentary registration for the convention in lieu of any travel funds.

E-mail questions

Scholars for the Dream Award Winners

2024
Kofi Adisa, Howard Community College
Edzordzi Agbozo, University of North Carolina Wilmington
Saurabh Anand, University of Georgia
Purna Chandra Bhusal, University of Texas at El Paso
Andy Cheng, University of Cincinnati
Valeria Fernandez, Soka University of America​
José Flores, University of Texas at El Paso
Priyanka Ganguly, Virginia Tech
Nicole Golden, Michigan State University
Xuan Jiang, Florida International University
Chloe Leavings, Wayne State University
Rency Luan, University of Waterloo
Nattaporn Luangpipat, University of Wisconsin–Madison
Anselma Prihandita, University of Washington
Sujash Purna, University of Wisconsin–Madison
Kurt Ramos, University of Central Florida
Bridgette Sanders, Florida State University
Jiaxing Shi (Carina), University of Maryland
Justine Trinh, Washington State University
Wei Xu, University of Arizona

2023
Sadia Afrin, University of Waterloo
Cody Ares Baynori, Columbia University
Khadidja Belhadi, Illinois State University
Anuj Gupta, University of Arizona
Lena Hakim, Wayne State University
Meng-Hsien (Neal) Liu, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Quang Ly, University of Miami
Angela Mack, Texas Christian University
Sherrel McLafferty, Bowling Green State University
Michelle Tram Nguyen, Bowling Green State University
Shankar Paudel, University of Texas at El Paso
María D. Pérez, Texas Christian University
Carolina Roni, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Chenxing Xie, North Carolina State University

2022
Kimberly Bain, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton
Steven Beardsley, University of California, San Diego
José Cano Jr., Texas Christian University, Fort Worth
Janelle Chu Capwell, University of Arizona, Tucson
Jianfen Chen, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN
Raquel DeLeon, Texas Tech University, Lubbock
Tabitha Espina, Northeastern University, Boston, MA
Angel Evans, The Ohio State University, Columbus
Wilfredo Flores, Michigan State University, East Lansing
Asmita Ghimire, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
Danie Jules Hallerman, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA
Nabila Hijazi, Loyola University Maryland, Baltimore
Raphael Ivan Reyes Juarez, University of Texas at El Paso
Suresh Lohani, University of Texas at El Paso
Misa Kinno Lucyshyn, Columbia University, New York, NY
Shyam B. Pandey, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN
Nupoor Ranade, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA
Hanan Saadi, Texas A&M International University, Laredo

2021
Kodwo Adam-Moses, Auburn University, AL
Thir B. Budhathoki, University of Arizona, Tucson
Jasmine Corona, California State University, Chico
Meghalee Das, Texas Tech University, Lubbock
Kara Larson, University of South Florida, Tampa
Rashida Mustafa, Teachers College, Columbia University, NY
Nitya Pandey, Florida State University, Tallahassee
Jagadish Paudel, University of Texas at El Paso
Qianqian Zhang-Wu, Northeastern University, Boston, MA

2020
Ariana Brazier, University of Pittsburgh, PA
Wenqi Cui, Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Nicole C. Cunningham-Frisbey, University of New Hampshire, Durham
Samah Elbelazi, Stanford University, CA
Valentina Fahler, University of California Santa Barbara
Subhi Hindi, University of Houston, TX
Cana Uluak Itchuaqiyaq, Utah State University, Logan
Florianne Jimenez, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Salma C. Kalim, Miami University, Oxford, OH
Charmian Lam, Indiana University, Bloomington
Natalie Madruga, University of Central Florida, Orlando
Havva Zorluel Özer, Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Loretta Ramirez, University of California, Irvine
Eric Manuel Rodriguez, Michigan State University, East Lansing
Sherwin Kawahakui Ranchez Sales, Washington State University, Pullman
Pritisha Shrestha, Syracuse University, NY
Sumyat Thu, University of Washington, Seattle
Dhipinder Walia, CUNY Graduate Center, NY
Zhaozhe Wang, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN
Yebing Zhao, Miami University, Oxford, OH

2019
Laura L. Allen, The Ohio State University, Columbus
Nouf Alshreif, Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Sweta Baniya, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN
Ashok Bhusal, The University of Texas at El Paso
Liana Clarke, Florida State University, Tallahassee
Christopher Balajadia Garcia, University of Guam, Mangilao
Les Hutchinson, Michigan State University, East Lansing
Charisse S. Iglesias, University of Arizona, Tucson
Tamara Issak, St. John’s University, Queens, NY
Jialei Jiang, Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Soyeon Lee, University of Houston, TX
Shewonda Leger, Michigan State University, East Lansing
Eduardo Mabilog, Nevada State College, Henderson
Charlotte Morgan, Cleveland State University, OH
Bibhushana Poudyal, The University of Texas at El Paso
Sukanto Roy, Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Joanna E. Sanchez-Avila, University of Arizona, Tucson
Karen R. Tellez-Trujillo, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces
Landy Watley, Howard University, Washington, DC
Hua Zhu, Miami University, Oxford, OH

2018
Lama Alharbi, Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Charissa Che, University of Utah, Salt Lake City
Telsha L. Curry, Syracuse University, NY
Khirsten L. Echols, University of Louisville, KY
Marlene Galvan, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, Edinburg
Christine Garcia, Eastern Connecticut State University, Willimantic
Kimberly C. Harper, North Carolina A&T State University, Greensboro
Brittany S. Hull, Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Ashanka Kumari, University of Louisville, KY
Halcyon M. Lawrence, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta
Shaofei Lu, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH
Louis M. Maraj, The Ohio State University, Columbus
Samantha McCalla, St. John’s University, Jamaica, NY
Temptaous T. Mckoy, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC
Kendra L. Mitchell, Florida State University, Tallahassee
Vincent Portillo, Syracuse University, NY
Cecilia D. Shelton, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC
Celeste Siqueiros, Murray State University, KY
Teigha Mae Van, Illinois Central College, East Peoria
Karrieann Soto Vega, Syracuse University, NY

2017
Maryam S Alikhani, Teachers College Columbia University, New York, NY
Candace Chambers, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa
Nina Feng, University of Utah, Salt Lake City
Michelle Grue, University of California, Santa Barbara
Logan Middleton, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Alejandra Irene Ramírez, University of Arizona, Tucson
Ella Dali Raynor, University of Central Florida, Orlando
Elijah Simmons, Miami University, Oxford, OH
Alison Lau Stephens, University of Oregon, Eugene
Mark Daniel Triana, Washington State University, Pullman

2016
Antonio Byrd, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Quanisha Charles, Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Brandon M. Erby, Penn State University, University Park
André Melvin Jones, Jr., Kean University, Union, NJ
Jamila M. Kareem, University of Louisville, KY
Cona Marshall, Michigan State University, East Lansing
Kelly Medina-López, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces
Consuelo Carr Salas, The University of Texas at El Paso
Danielle Tillman Slaughter, Georgia State University, Atlanta
Sheeba Varkey, St. John’s University, Jamaica, NY

2015
Cara M. Chang, University of Hawai?i at Manoa
Shenika Hankerson, Michigan State University, East Lansing
Erika T. Johnson, Texas Woman’s University, Denton
Ashley L. Newby, Michigan State University, East Lansing
Joy Robinson, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta
Yanira Rodriguez, Syracuse University, NY
Sherita V. Roundtree, The Ohio State University, Columbus
James Chase Sanchez, Texas Christian University, Fort Worth
Rachel Sanchez, Washington State University, Pullman
Dawn N. Hicks Tafari, Winston-Salem State University, NC

2014
Pauline Felicia Baird, Bowling Green State University, OH
April Baker-Bell, Michigan State University, East Lansing
Amanda L. Funk, Kutztown University of Pennsylvania
Arianna M. Howard, The Ohio State University, Columbus
Luciana Junqueira, Georgia State University, Atlanta
Jennifer Lin LeMesurier, University of Washington, Seattle
Kyle T. Mays, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Reanae McNeal, Texas Woman’s University, Denton
Ana Milena Ribero, University of Arizona, Tucson
Flourice W. Richardson, Illinois State University, Normal

2013
Jada Augustine, California State University, Northridge
Catalina Bartlett, Texas A&M University, College Station
Tara Betts, Binghamton University, NY
Victor Jesus Del Hierro Texas A&M University, College Station
Romeo Garcia, Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi
Michelle Garza, Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi
Laura Martinez, University of Central Florida, Orlando
Indra N. Mukhopadhyay, University of Southern California, Los Angeles
Seonsook Park, New Mexico Highlands University-Rio Rancho
Alma Villanueva, Texas A&M University, College Station

2012
Steven Alvarez, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, NY
Erica Britt, University of Michigan-Flint
Karen Ching Carter, Arizona State University, Tempe
Christina Victoria Cedillo, Northeastern State University-Broken Arrow, OK
Marino Ivo Lopes Fernandes, University of New Hampshire, Durham
Juan M. Gallegos, University of Arizona, Tucson
Eileen Lagman, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Helen Lee, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Jimisha I. Relerford, Georgia State University, Atlanta
LaToya L. Sawyer, Syracuse University, NY

2011
Sonia C. Arellano, Texas State University-San Marcos
Lamiyah Bahrainwala, Michigan State University, East Lansing
Michael Sterling Burns, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Lehua Ledbetter, Michigan State University, East Lansing
Kelly McLain, University of Alaska Anchorage
Caroline Prieto, San Francisco State University, CA
Cheyenne Riggs, Texas State University, Austin
Elias Serna, University of California, Riverside
Reva E. Sias, Syracuse University, NY

2010
Tamika Barrett, University of Pittsburgh, PA
Eileen Ain Shams Eddy, Washington State University, Pullman
R. Candace Epps-Robertson, Syracuse University, NY
Fernando Febres, Emerson College, Boston, MA
Regina L. Golar, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa
ku’ualoha ho’omanawanui, University of Hawai’i at Manoa
Vivian García López, Boise State University, ID
Brandy Nalani McDougall, University of Hawai’i at Manoa
Cruz Medina, University of Arizona, Tucson
Gabriela Raquel Ríos, Texas A&M University, College Station

2009
Maryam Elena Jamali Ashtiani, California State University, Fresno
Lina Buffington, Philadelphia Futures, Pennsylvania
Jason B. Esters, Lincoln University, Pennsylvania
David F. Green, Jr., Penn State University, University Park
Janie Jaramillo-Santoy, Texas Tech University & Texas State Technical College-Harlingen
Marissa M. Juárez, University of Arizona, Tucson
Wen Ma, Le Moyne College, Syracuse, NY
Sarah Nieto Olivas, Texas State University-San Marcos
Bettina Ramón, Texas State University-San Marcos
Michelle Bachelor Robinson, University of Louisville, KY

2008
Qwo-Li Driskill, Michigan State University, East Lansing
Crystal M. Hills, Georgia State University, Atlanta
Donna Hunter, Stanford University, California
Aja Y. Martinez, University of Arizona, Tucson
Natalie A. Martínez, Arizona State University, Tempe
Leslie D. Norris, Rappahannock Community College, Glenns, Virginia
Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia
Kathryn Ortiz, University of Arizona, Tucson
Andrea Osteen, California State University, Fresno
Melissa Berry Pearson, University of South Carolina, Columbia
Staci M. Perryman-Clark, Michigan State University, East Lansing

2007
Maria Bibbs, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Tamika L. Carey, Syracuse University, New York
Korina Jocson, Stanford University, California
Donna King, The Pennsylvania State University, State College
Lydia Balderamos Loskot, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces
Barbara Castillo Noyes, University of Texas at Arlington
Sung Ohm, Ohio University, Athens
Ryan Masaaki Omizo, University of Hawaii at Manoa
Debbie A. Reese, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Kimberly Thomas, Indiana University of Pennsylvania

2006
Timothy J. Brown, West Chester University, Pennsylvania
Kevin A. Browne, The Pennsylvania State University, College Park
Rachel Carrales, University of Texas at San Antonio
Elizabeth Imende, High Point University, North Carolina
Kendall Leon, Michigan State University, East Lansing
Jolivette Mecenas, University of Hawaii at Manoa
Soncerey L. Montgomery, Winston-Salem State University, North Carolina
Iris Ruiz, University of California, San Diego
Paul Velazquez, Texas State University-San Marcos
Han Yu, Illinois State University, Normal

2005
Cedric D. Burrows, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio
Linh Dich, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Robin Evans, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater
Maisha T. Fisher, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia
Elisa Marie Norris, Syracuse University, New York
Daisy Pignetti, University of South Florida, Tampa
Eric Darnell Pritchard, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Adina Sanchez-Garcia, University of Miami, Florida
Justin Schapp, Syracuse University, New York
Robyn Tasaka, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu

2004
JuliAnna Avila, University of California, Berkeley
Jeffrey Duncan-Andrade, University of California, Los Angeles
Ted Hall, Michigan State University, East Lansing
David Kirkland, Michigan State University, East Lansing
Melvette Melvin, Penn State University, State College
Rose Metts, Savannah State University, Georgia
Kelvin Monroe, Washington State University, Pullman
Spencer Salas, University of Georgia, Atlanta
Cecilia Solis-Sublette, Texas A&M University
Sandra Young, University of South Carolina, Columbia

2003
Jacqueline Brown, University of Louisville
Carol Brochin Ceballos, Laredo Community College, Texas
Rene Agustin De los Santos, University of California, Santa Barbara
Nichole Hamai, University of Hawaii, Honolulu
Jungmi Kim, Temple University
Seonjoo Moon, Temple University
Ken Rayes, University of New Orleans
Eunsook Rhee, Temple University
Tonya Scott, Texas A&M University, Commerce
Lillie Whetten, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces

2002
Haivan Hoang, The Ohio State University, Columbus
Carlos Evia, Texas Tech University, Lubbock
Michelle Johnson, Claremont Graduate University, California
Asao Inoue, Washington State University,  Pullman
Patricia Trujillo, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
Hilary Owens, California State University, Chico
Derek Landers, Cincinnati State College
Piper Kendrix Williams, Rutgers University
Rachel Brooks-Rather, Ohio University, Athens
Margaret Wong, Quinsagamond Community College, Marlborough,  MA

2001
Terry Carter, University of South Carolina
Rose Gubele, Sonoma State University, California
Daniel Justice, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
Rhea Estelle Lathan, University of Wisconsin at Madison
Kim Lee, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
Meredith Lee, University of Hawaii at Manoa
Kathleen McColley, University of Hawaii
Paul Minifee, University of Texas at Austin
Josye Sadler, University of Southern Mississippi
Faye Spencer Maor, Valdosta State University, Georgia

2000
Aesha Adams, Marquette University, Milwaukee
Christina Bell, Montgomery College, Maryland
Rebecca Cisneros, University of Vermont
Lisa Trevino Roy-Davis, Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Avis G. Hewitt, Grand Valley State University, Michigan
Joseph Ng/Eng, Eastern Washington University
Annette Harris-Powell, University of Louisville, Kentucky
Rebecca Small, Sonoma State University, California
Rhonda Robinson Thomas, University of New Hampshire, Durham
Kendra Vaglienti, Texas Woman’s University, Addison

1999
Wilson C. Chen, University of California
Resa Crane Bizzaro, East Carolina University
E. K. Daufin, Alabama State University
Charmin Granger, Miami University
Emily Porcincula Lawsin, California State University, Northridge
Levita D. Mondie, University of Maryland, College Park
Dora Ramirez, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
Kimberly A. Robinson, California State University, San Marcos
Gregory E. Rutledge, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Mae Lombos Wlazlinski, State University of West Georgia, Carrollton

1998
Fred Arroyo, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
Steve Chu, Iowa State University
Sheldon George, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts
Serena R. Huffman, University of New Mexico, Alburquerque
Celestine W. Liu, New York University
Cedrick May, University of Texas, Arlington
Elizabeth McHenry, University of Texas, Austin
Diana Elena Moran Molina, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Luana Uluave, Northampton Community College, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania
Linda Walking-Woman, University of Iowa, Iowa City

1997
Cassandra J. Canada, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana
Ginny Carney, University of Kentucky, Lexington
Maria De Jesus Estrada, Indiana University of Pennsylvania
La Tisha Camille Fowlkes, Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Chikako D. Kumamoto, College of DuPage, Glen Ellyln Illinois
Cynthia Mccollie-Lewis, Long Island University, Brooklyn, New York
Donald McCrary, Long Island University, Brooklyn, New York
Charlotte Simmonds-Hammons, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts
A. Tyson Sims, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana
Marion Okawa Sonomura, Brigham Young University, Laie, Hawaii

1996
Erika Aigner-Varoz, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque
Victoria Cliett, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan
Renita Duncan, Illinois State University, Normal
Amanda Espinosa-Aguilar, University of Nevada, Reno
Sandra M. Grayson, Bentley College, Waltham, Massachusetts
Terry Haynes, State University of New York/Westchester Community College, Valhalla Joyce Rain Latora, University of Massachusetts, Boston
Lynn A. Casmier-Paz, University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Gwendolyn Pough, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio
K. Hyoejin Yoon, State University of New York, Albany

1995
Lena Ampadu, University of Maryland, College Park
María C. M. de Guerrero, Inter American University of Puerto Rico
Phyllis Pearson Elmore, North Lake College, Dallas, Texas
Carlton Floyd, University of Idaho, Moscow
Janice Gould, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque
David Holmes, Pepperdine University, Malibu, California
Terese Monberg, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York
Shondel Nero, Long Island University, New York Pata Suyemoto, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
José L. Torres-Padilla, University of Puerto Rico, Cayey

1994
Jennifer Barfield, University of North Carolina, Wilmington
Kisha Brown, Long Island University, Brooklyn, New York
José Irizarry, University of Puerto Rico, Mayguez
Susan Kimoto, Cowell College, Santa Cruz, California
Alison O. Lee, College of San Mateo Tohcone College, San Francisco, California
Michelle McIver-Bell, Fayetteville State University, North Carolina
Natalia Apostolos Menendez, Foothill College, Los Altos Hills, California
Malea Powell, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio
Elaine Richardson, Michigan State University, East Lansing
Patricia Joan Saunders, University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

1993
Meta G. Carstaphen, Texas Woman’s University, Denton
Louise M. Connal, University of Arizona, Tuscon
Evelyn Flores, University of Guam, Barrigada
Sharon Gamble, City College of New York, New York
Lisa M. Gonsalves, University of Massachusetts, Boston
Renee Moreno, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Jeryl Prescott, University of South Florida, Tampa
George Q. Xu, Clarion University of Pennsylvania, Clarion

Early last month, Lawrence Lessig, gave a keynote at the World Intellectual Property Organization’s (WIPO) Global Meeting in Geneva.  The theme of this year’s meeting was “Emerging Copyright Licensing Modalities: Facilitating Access to Culture in the Digital Age,” and the goal of the meeting was to “raise the awareness of member states on the complexities underlining a vast variety of licensing practices in different sectors, including the online market for music, the software industry, and open access publishing.”  In his 38 minute speech, Lessig moved beyond merely raising awareness of US Copyright issues and issued a call to action: WIPO must take the lead in copyright reform if there is any chance to fix what is, in Lessig’s estimation, a “failed system.”¹  

The system’s failure is not an “accident,” according to Lessig, “it’s implicit in the architecture of copyright as we inherited it.”  It isn’t that the law has grown more complicated, it’s that the law has stayed the same, even though the nature and scope of what it regulates has changed dramatically:

At the turn of the century US copyright law was technical, inconsistent, and difficult to understand, but it didn’t apply to very many people or very many things.  If one were an author or a publisher of books, maps, charts, paintings, sculptures, photographs, or sheet music, a playwright or producer of plays, or a printer, the copyright law bore on one’s business….ordinary citizens, however, could go about their business without ever encountering a copyright problem. 90 years later, US copyright law is even more technical, inconsistent, and difficult to understand.  More importantly, it touches everyone and everything.  Technology, heedless of law, has developed modes that insert multiple acts of reproduction and transmission – potentially actionable events under the copyright statute – into commonplace daily transaction.  Most of us can no longer spend even an hour without colliding with the copyright law. (Lessig quoting Jessica Litman, 1994)²

Technology may be “heedless” of law, but the law cannot remain “heedless” of technology.  In an analog world, most uses of culture were unregulated.  Think of the example of a book in physical space.  To read the book, give someone the book, sell the book, or sleep on the book are all free, unregulated uses of the book because none of these uses produce a copy.  “Enter the internet where, because of a digital platform, every single use produces a copy.  And we go from this balance of unregulated and regulated and fair uses, to a presumptively regulated use for every single use, merely because the platform through which we get access to our culture has changed.”³  

What has also changed, according to Lessig, are our “ecologies of creativity.”  Creativity happens within an ecology; ecologies are environments that set the conditions of exchange.  Our ecologies of creativity can be loosely categorized as those that “have money at the core” (the professional ecology), those that “don’t have money at the core” (the amateur ecology), and those where “people don’t use money to express value” at all (the sharing ecology).  These ecologies are not mutually exclusive and, in fact, must coexist to survive. 

The professional ecology depends upon an “effective and efficient system of copyright” to assure that compensation can provide the incentive the artist needs to create; the amateur ecology depends on the opportunity for “free use and sharing,” not on control and copyright and compensation.  It is within this sharing ecology that children, lovers, friends and family live – an ecology whose character would change radically if money were introduced as a mode of exchange.  “Imagine friends,” Lessig asks, “inviting the other for lunch the following week and the answer is ‘Sure, how about for 50 bucks?’”  Our work as scholars “is and has always been” a kind of hybrid activity: “creating within a mixed economy of free and paid” and depending not upon “exclusive control, but both on free and fair use of creative work that is built upon and then spread.”  The “critical point” Lessig makes with these examples is that a copyright system has to support each of these ecologies; it cannot privilege one and neglect the others.  Of course, these ecologies are moving targets – government, technology, and economics change and redefine them for every age – so it is critical that our laws keep up with these changes. 

Yet Lessig asserts that our copyright laws have “failed” They have “failed to assure the adequate incentives in the professional culture, and failed to protect the necessary freedoms in the amateur and critical or scientific culture.”  It is because of this failure that he “flings himself across the Atlantic” to ask WIPO to take the lead in reform.  In the short term, he asks that WIPO actively encourage systems of voluntary licensing (like Creative Commons) as they create a “better balance” between the ecologies of professional and amateur creativity.  Rather than using a one-size fits all copyright protection, creators can use voluntary licensing to more accurately mark their content with the freedoms they intend for it to carry (Al Jazeera, the White House, and Wikipedia have all released content under such licenses.)  In the long term, Lessig asked that WIPO support a “Blue Sky Commission,” a group that would have “the freedom to think about what architecture for copyright makes sense in the digital age, freed from the current implementation of copyright.”    

Lawrence Lessig has never been shy when it comes to enumerating the problems of the US copyright system.  Whether he is speaking to Stephen Colbert or to the preeminent IP agency of the UN, he makes clear that our existing system of copyright “could never work in the digital architecture of the Internet.”  “Either it will force people to stop creating,” Lessig argues, “or it will force a revolution.  And both options, in my view, are not acceptable.”  The extremes that Lessig identifies here – prohibition or revolt – are the extremes that will “lead to the destruction of the core value of copyright” as well as “corrupt the rule of law in a democracy.”  Reform needs to take place, not somewhere in the middle, but somewhere completely outside of the constrictive architecture of existing laws – in a wide-open place with a big “blue-sky” – where we can think freely and clearly about how to define the new, rather than about how to protect the old. 

Traci A. Zimmerman
Associate Professor – School of Writing, Rhetoric, and Technical Communication
James Madison University
Senior Chair – CCCC-IP Caucus

¹All quotes from Lessig are from the transcript of his WIPO keynote  http://dotsub.com/view/d354cf7e-835e-464d-b171-ef1463ed15ee/viewTranscript/eng 

²In his keynote, Lessig uses this quote from Jessica Litman’s article “The Exclusive Right to Read”  13 CARDOZO ARTS & ENT. L.J. 29 (1994);  
For a video of his slideshow presentation, see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AT02dOSbxc

³Lessig also gave a brief interview to IP Watch about the WIPO conference; it can be viewed at the following link http://vimeo.com/16512341

Intellectual Property Reports Main Page

With deep gratitude to editor Martine Courant Rife, I welcome you to a new feature: IP Reports. These monthly articles are being sponsored jointly by the Intellectual Property Committee and Intellectual Property Caucus to keep you updated on the latest developments and research.

What, then, is “intellectual property,” and why are two groups interested in it? Intellectual property issues have been vexed ever since laws were enacted in Great Britain (and then the United States) during the 1700s that treated products of the mind as tangible goods. In the centuries that have followed, “intellectual property” has come to include copyright, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets. For the NCTE/CCCC community, copyright issues are perhaps the most familiar.

Copyright laws define concepts such as “fair use”; copyright contracts manage our publications and instructional materials; and copyright holders must often be consulted to acquire permissions to reproduce images or other materials. In recent years, traditional understandings of copyright have been challenged by digital media, particularly with the advent of concepts such as the Creative Commons license, open source, and open access. Similarly, current social mores and research have reshaped our understandings of all aspects of intellectual property:  authorship, plagiarism, the public domain, a university’s capacity to hold patents, institutional repositories for preprint and postprint work, students’ rights to their own texts, the effects of institutional branding and trademarks, the conflict of interests between dissertation research and proprietary data, and so on.

To keep pace with these changes, the CCCC Intellectual Property Committee was established in 1996. The IP Committee is composed of nine members who represent different constituencies among the NCTE/CCCC memberships. The Committee is part of the official governing structure of the CCCC and reports directly to the Executive Committee. Its primary charge is “to keep the CCCC and NCTE memberships informed about intellectual property developments.” The IP Committee also proposes policy statements on a variety of issues to be considered by the Executive Committee and NCTE/CCCC memberships.

The IP Committee emerged from the work of like-minded scholars who came together in 1994 to establish the IP Caucus. The IP Caucus regularly sponsors its own events at the annual CCCC Convention. Caucus members undertake projects to devise new instructional materials; articles, books, and websites; policy statements; conference plans; and so on to support research, publication, and action on IP issues. The IP Caucus and the IP Committee are separate entities, but they coordinate. In some cases, the Caucus acts as a task force for the Committee; at other times, the Caucus proposes actions to be considered by the Committee. 

The most recent work of the IP Caucus and the IP Committee can be found online.  The IP Caucus maintains a resource website.  Meanwhile, the IP Committee sponsors The Top Intellectual Property Developments of the Year, reports that can be accessed through the NCTE website at /cccc/committees/ip.  As you will find, individual members of both IP groups are constantly engaged in new research and activist projects. The monthly IP Reports will enable you to stay informed on the latest progress. 

Karen Lunsford, Chair, Intellectual Property Committee

Intellectual Property Reports Main Page

Teresa Thomas: Case #2

Characterization of Institution

Research I University

Characterization of Department

Ph.D. granted in English

How would this case turn out in your department?  At your university/college?

At our institution, refereed electronic publications, in addition to print publications, are considered as evidence of published scholarship toward tenure.  However, distinctions are made between scholarship that results in a publishable textbook or classroom materials and scholarship that advances research and theory in the field.  Textbooks on occasion may represent an advancement in the field, but this must be demonstrated by the candidate and confirmed by referees.  Unclear in this case is the focus of the candidate’s on-line dissertation.  Contributions to the field of rhetoric and composition, on line or in print, may contribute to improved classroom practice without clearly relating to the development of rhetorical theory or empirical research in language, rhetoric, or non-literary writing.  An on-line or print reference work—a term also used to describe Professor Thomas’ dissertation—could be a bibliographic essay, glossary, or annotated bibliography, again works that are certainly valuable, but not considered to move a field forward.  At present, for a university press to only consider publishing the book on-line would suggest to me that it does not have the impact that one might expect—greater investment is implied by a print text.  This situation may change, even within the next five years, but at present, on-line publication by a university press would be viewed as an experimental venture.

What are the Department Chair’s responsibilities toward Thomas? Which did she/he fulfill?  Fail?

The Department Head has the responsibility to analyze each of Professor Thomas’s publications upon completing the third-year review as they illustrate that she had met departmental standards for tenure and promotion.  The Department Head also has the obligation to apprise new faculty of tenure and promotion requirements upon hiring and to articulate how the new hire’s research plans do or do not suggest that he/she is on the road to achieving tenure.  The dissent at the faculty meeting is a “teachable moment” for the department; here faculty and the chair should be giving serious consideration to how on-line publication is treated in the departmental and college tenure and promotion guidelines.  The latter are not mentioned anywhere in the case, and it would appear that this faculty member very well may be at risk of failing to reach tenure even if her publications were all print-based, given her lack of orientation to or understanding of the department’s T&P requirements.  Questions that remain unanswered: What part do grants play in the requirements for T&P?  Does the department make distinctions among research that advances the field, research that advances pedogogy in the field, and scholarship in the service of producing teaching materials?  What is considered a refereed publication and what criteria define the value of one kind of refereed publication as opposed to another?  Finally, if written publications in addition to electronic will be expected or accepted for tenure, this criterion , if not spelled out in the T&P requirements, should be reflected in the annual reviews of the candidate as well as the third-year review.

What are the Personnel Committee’s responsibilities toward Thomas?  Which  did they fulfill?  Fail?

If the department has a personnel committee that makes recommendations on T&P, this committee at each point of review should be reiterating the department’s expectations for publication venue, noting whether print publications in addition to electronic publications are expected, the quantity of publication expected, and how the quality of a publication venue will be accessed.  Factors that might be considered include: refereed vs. non-refereed work, university press or commercial press, regional or national journal, and so on.  The personnel committee that hired Professor Thomas, it appears to me, had the obligation to inform her, as part of the search process, of the department’s tenure and promotion guidelines, including expectations for publication as these are specified; however, this is more clearly the responsibility of the department head, who is the appointing authority.

What are the responsibilities of the Dean?  Which did she/he fulfill?  Fail?

The Dean, who also approves appointments, should assure that the candidate has received the written tenure and promotion guidelines of the department, College, and university (if the latter exist).  In my view, Deans also have the obligation to provide mentoring workshops that supplement departmental and university information to appropriately inform candidates about how their accomplishments will be reviewed by College T&P committees and how to prepare their portfolio for review.

What are Thomas’s responsibilities?  Which did she/he fulfill?  Fail?

Professor Thomas is obligated to inquire about the Department, College, and University tenure and promotion requirements upon being hired.  If her intention was only to publish on-line, she needed to state this up front, in my view, because this kind of profile for a publication record is so radically different from what is traditionally expected.  In short, she should be expected to know a thing or two about the requirements of the profession, and if she is uncertain, to ask these questions of her department head and assigned mentors.  The issue of receiving appropriate credit for on-line publications in an English Department is parallel to the issue of evaluating creative work as opposed to critical or theoretical work and of submitting pedagogical research as opposed to empirical or theoretical work related directly to the study of language or literature.   Another parallel issue is that of crediting for tenure single-authored publications as opposed to multiply-authored publications.  In each instance, a traditional area or mode is being challenged by a new approach.  Like it or not, the person “breaking the barriers” has a responsibility to define how their work achieves departmental research expectations, as does the department to define, in writing, what those expectations are.

What went wrong?  What went right?

As stated earlier, when the Department decided to hire a faculty member who was conducting research on a topic and in a mode never encountered before, the Department, through the chair, had an obligation to define how this research would be evaluated for tenure, preferably through articulating these expectations in tenure and promotion requirements.  Likewise, the faculty member who is doing non-traditional work cannot expect that a department in which he or she is breaking ground to accept this work without question.  New faculty members are obligated to present in their review portfolio the rationale for their publication choices, relating this rationale to articulated departmental standards.  Finally, the department head has the responsibility in annual reviews to consistently relate the candidate’s productivity to articulated standards for tenure and promotion.  Deans who review departmental evaluations have the obligation to communicate with department chairs and review committees about the helpfulness of their reviews as feedback for their faculty.

Teresa Thomas: Case #2

Characterization of Institution

“Research Intensive” institution (the new name for what used to be Research II, I think).

Characterization of Department

Ph.D. granted  in Rhetoric & Witing
M.F.A., granted in Literature
M.A. granted in Literature
M.A. TESL
M.A. granted in Tech Writin,
B.A. programs, full array

How would this case turn out in your department?  At your university/college?

The departmental recommendation would be positive, I believe.
This is partly because the department is quite diverse (grad programs in Comp & rhet, TESL, tech writing and creative writing as well as lit); because the Rhetoric & Writing PhD program emphasizes writing pedagogy; and because there has been a track record of strong non-print publication by at least two faculty whose cases were not as singlemindedly non-print as in this case.

Given questions and demands for back-up documentation when the department has recommended people heavy in non-print work, I’d expect “TeresaThomas” to have a much tougher time with the College Personnel Committee than with the Department.

What are the Department Chair’s responsibilities toward Thomas? Which did she/he fulfill?  Fail?

The chair seems to have assummed too much: that “Teresa” would draw the same meanings she did from the mid-term report, that she would act on that meaning by getting some things in literal print.  And the Chair seems to have had one non-directive conference and then let the matter go for (what?) two years.  The first failure is being inexplict, both in the conference and in not having written recommendations.  The second seems to be lack of follow-up.

What are the Personnel Committee’s responsibilities toward Thomas?  Which  did they fulfill?  Fail?

N/A

What are the responsibilities of the Dean?  Which did she/he fulfill?  Fail?

N/A

What are Thomas’s responsibilities?  Which did she/he fulfill?  Fail?

Teresa Thomas” probably fulfilled all her responsibilites–strong teaching, good research and publishing, even grants–AS SHE UNDERSTOOD them.  If the Chair failed to be explict about finetuning those responsibilities for her, she seems to have failed to check her understanding against other things in the department.  Given the split view of non-paper publishing in the three evaluations and given the Chair’s general words about a few print publications, she should have had some questions about her understanding and she should have asked questions.  And, over the next couple years, she should have initiated some contact with the Chair about what she was doing with her publishing.

What went wrong?  What went right?

…[I]t isn’t clear that anything is wrong: the non-print record “Teresa” has by the last paragraph could be so strong that department skeptics are convinced.  But it could go the other way too:  those who were dubious about non-print publishing two years earlier might take her paper-free record of scholarship and teachhing as evidence of rebeliousness and uncollegiality and see “Teresa” as a good person not to have as a tenured-faculty colleague.

My approach as a Chair would be to take a cautious approach: to assume that things might be sticky for the candidate and to be more proactive on her behalf.  So…, I’d suggest that this candidate and chair read a couple chapters about the matter in Academic Advancement in Composition Studies (Erlbaum, 1997):

“Preparing Yourself for Successful Tenure Review”  117-27)

“Mentor and Evaluator: The Chair’s Role in Promotion and Tenure Review (147-65)

See <http://personal.bgsu.edu/~richgeb/book.html> for information about:

Academic Advancement in Composition Studies: Scholarship, Publication, Promotion, Tenure (Erlbaum, 1997), edited by Richard Gebhardt and Barbara Genelle Smith Gebhard

Jared Johns: Case #1

Characterization of Institution

Comprehensive State University, Science and Technology campus

Characterization of Department

M.A. granted in English (Degree granted jointly with another campus in the 4 campus system.)

B.A. granted in English
(The English department has some 40-50 majors, and teaches a large number of service courses for the engineering students.  The English major is a very traditional literature degree.)

In the department; all tenured faculty (currently 5 out of 10) are members of the departmental P&T committee.  Each department elects a rep to the College of Arts and Sciences P&T committee (I have served on it), and each school elects a rep to the University-wide commitee.

How would Jared Johns’ case turn out in your department?  At your university/college?

The department probably would have voted in favor of reappointment at our 3rd year review, with very clearly-expressed reservations about whether Johns would be granted tenure.  The University-Wide 3rd year review committee (separate from T&P; I’ve been on a couple of these) would have agreed.

Our department requires 3-5 articles in peer-reviewed books or journals, or a book, for tenure.  The publications would seem weak to our department, and the teaching would seem weak on all levels. We do not do outside evaluations for 3rd year reviews, but they count for a lot in tenure reviews, since ours is a small department in which there is little overlap of specialization.  Outside evaluations also carry a lot of weight at the college level.  Given our current focus on recruitment and retention, teaching evaluations would be a major concern.

What are the Department Chair’s responsibilities toward Johns?  Which did she/he fulfill?  Fail?

John’s work with the student technical consultants should not be faculty work, and the chair should have warned him away from it right from the start.  Administering the facility is one thing; trouble-shooting machines and installing software is something else.  I’m not sure whether Johns should have realized this, the chair should have, or whatever–but something very much like this happened to a foreign language professor at our institution, and I blamed the chair for letting it happen.

There is clearly some need for intervention with Johns to bring up his course evaluation scores and to get him on the right track with publication.  As chair, I would be worried whether I had clearly enough laid out the issues with Johns–or whether he was just not listening well, which seems to often happen.

At the very least, the chair should have worked at finding Johns a mentor–not just evaluators and judges of his teaching.  Johns seems to have been going it very much alone in the department, and going wrong.

The chair should have either gotten behind the technology advisory committee or helped Johns back away from the writing facility work–which seems to have brought him very little credit and taken a great deal of time.

What are the Personnel Committee’s responsibilities toward Johns?  Which did they fulfill?  Fail?

They at least should have figured out how to read his on-line material.

What are the responsibilities of the Dean?  Which did she/he fulfill?  Fail?

In our department, tenure and promotion is primarily a departmental issue.  I’m concerned, though, that the “administration” of the computer facility that this faculty member undertook was actually more like “technical support,”  and budgeting for this might be in the dean’s balliwick.  (In my case, I just throw myself at the mercy of computer services and let them do the scut work.)

What are Johns’ responsibilities?  Which did she/he fulfill?  Fail?

Johns needed to make allies and get help–from the chair or from other members of the department.  He needed to figure out how to raise his teaching scores.  And he needed to publish in venues that the department would recognize as scholarly.

He needed to figure out how to spend his time most productively.  The listserv might have brought him professional recognition, but not credit toward tenure.  Better to wait for this kind of project until you have tenure.

What went wrong?  What went right?

What went wrong is that this hard-working, intelligent faculty member has just a couple of years to pull together the publications and teaching evaluations he would need to be granted tenure at my institution–and at most others. He needed some canny mentoring from someone who could help him plot out pre and post tenure career strategies.  He seems to have been much more successful at the work of his discipline than at meeting the institutional criteria for tenure and promotion.

Jared Johns: Case #1

Characterization of Institution

Research II-Intensive University

Characterization of Department

Ph.D. in English
M.A. in English
M.S. in Writing
B.A. in English
B.A. in English Education

How would Jered Johns’s case turn out in your department?  At your university/college?

In our department, it’s likely that Johns probably would not receive a favorable recommendation for reappointment. Both the scholarship and teaching would be the problems. The problem with the scholarship focuses primarily on peer review. The problem with teaching seems to focus on his difficulty in working technology into his courses in a way that clearly enhances learning or at least the students’ sense that they are learning.

At our university, conference proceedings and reviews are considered third-tier publications, so they would not help the case much. They could count as second- or first-tier publications if a case could be made that they are the equivalent in quality to publications that would fit within one of these categories, but I don’t see details in the case that would incline me to think that such a case would be justified. We would count the essay published in Computers and Composition before the beginning of Jared’s appointment as a first-tier publication. I mention this because I know that some departments will only consider work completed after the beginning of the appointment. However, we wouldn’t count the essay published in the edited collection because there is no indication of peer review. The on-line book also lacks a description of the peer-review process used, so I assume it was not peer-reviewed. In all, there is too little in the way of genuine peer-reviewed scholarship to justify an expectation that tenure and promotion would be granted in the near future.

It could be argued that the favorable responses of the outside reviewers to the material they were given constitutes a form of peer review and this may be why the members of the personnel committee voted in favor of reappointment. At our university, however, the outside reviewers offer a chance for a summative analysis of an individual’s performance during his or her probationary period, but they don’t serve as a substitute for the reviewers involved in determining whether or not a particular article or book produced during this period should be published.

I should stress that the central issue as far as scholarship is concerned isn’t a matter of the form that the publication takes (digital vs. paper). Whatever form a publication takes, it would need to undergo peer review. The personnel committee’s response is somewhat confusing on this point since, in advising the Chair to give Johns a “stern warning to publish only in refereed print journals until he finished his probationary period,” they assert a principle that wasn’t prominent in their analysis of Jared’s record. The discussion of their analysis suggests that they focused on peer review and not on whether a publication took digital or paper form, but insisting on publications in refereed print journals, they also seem to be making an issue of the form a publication takes as well as whether or not it was peer reviewed.

In the area of teaching, a number of people remark on Jared’s innovative use of technology in his courses. While the innovations themselves would be a positive feature in the evaluation of his teaching, they would not be considered ends in themselves. A favorable review of his teaching would depend on his demonstrating that the innovations contribute to effective learning in his courses. That Johns’s teaching doesn’t seem to have gotten better after a problematic start and has remained at a poorer than average level would contribute to a negative review. At the same time, he seems to have done better in his graduate courses, which would work to his advantage, but it is not clear why he enjoys increased success at the graduate level. Certainly, the number of graduate students who seek him out to work with them on theses and dissertations is a positive statement about his work in the classroom.

The most troubling part of the teaching record is that he seems to have had a chance to work through teaching difficulties over a succession of semesters, but it doesn’t seem to have improved, possibly because he didn’t take early warnings seriously enough. The details of the case don’t make it clear, but I would like to know what happened after Jared’s first conversation with his Chair about how to improve his teaching. Did Johns invite the Director of the Center for Teaching Excellence to visit his classes? If he did, what came of this in his effort to make his teaching better? If he didn’t consult with the Director, why not? This dialogue should have been an important part of Jared’s effort to improve his teaching, but nothing seems to have come of the Chair’s suggestion that Johns seek assistance.

At our university, the department’s negative decision would be supported at the college and university levels.

What are the Department Chair’s responsibilities toward Johns?  Which did she/he fulfill?  Fail?

The Department Chair has three basic responsibilities toward Johns: 1) to make sure Johns understands from the outset the requirements for tenure and promotion, 2) to advise Johns during his probationary period on his performance relative to these standards, and 3) to give Johns assignments that balance departments needs and Jared’s needs. The last of these includes creating a set of assignments that make it possible for Jared to meet the standards set forth for tenure and promotion. The Chair seems to have been proactive in advising Jared early in his probationary period to seek help with his teaching, and to this extent he met the second responsibility at least in part. However, I see no other evidence of efforts on the Chair’s part to address the other two responsibilities and the second responsibility as it bears on scholarship, which proved to be a major part of Johns’ difficulty.

With regard to the third responsibility, the Chair seems to have allowed Johns to assume a responsibility that worked against his ability to do the things necessary to establish a successful probationary record. I refer to the administration of the Department computer facility. Responsibilities of this kind are notorious for the excessive demands they place on those in charge of running them, even when a course release is provided. The Chair should have resisted the assignment or, if it was absolutely necessary that Jared accept it, he should have helped Johns articulate what exactly the administration of the facility could entail without its becoming the albatross that it seems to have become for Jared. The Chair seems to have failed with regard to the last of these in part because he allowed Johns to assume a set of responsibilities that exceeded what Jared could handle.

I do note that the Director of Graduate Studies advised Johns to reduce his level of involvement on graduate thesis and dissertation committees. So, there was an effort on the part of the Department to alert Jared to an imbalance evident in his work (i.e., disproportionate amounts of time spent on the computer facility and on graduate committees). If this was also accompanied by indications that the time saved by cutting back on these responsibilities should be re-directed to getting peer-reviewed articles in print (electronic or paper), then the Department, through the Graduate Director, made a reasonable effort to meet the second responsibility with regard to scholarship. At the same time, the Graduate Director should not have been the only or even the primary one sending this message. It should have been sent regularly by the Chair and the personnel committee as well.

What are the Personnel Committee’s responsibilities toward Johns?  Which did they fulfill?  Fail?

At our university, the personnel committee, chaired by the Department Chair, reviews a faculty member’s work annually and provides written feedback on the individual’s work for the preceding year. For faculty who are on a probationary contract, the written feedback specifically discusses the relationship between the year’s work and progress toward tenure and promotion. I assume that most departments provide annual evaluations, though I don’t see any mention of anything like this in Johns’ case. The primary responsibility of a personnel committee should be to provide this feedback in some form, and this committee does not seem to have done this. Their first engagement with the details of Johns’ record seems to come in this fourth-year review, which may be too late to do Johns much good.

In reaching a favorable decision in the fourth-year review, the committee seems to want to support Jared as far as his record will allow. In this, I see the committee recognizing its developmental responsibility. At the same time, this is happening so late in the process that this recognition will have little or no effect on Jared’s tenure and promotion decision in two years.

The committee’s efforts to evaluate Johns teaching seem haphazard at best. The two committee members who disapprove of the lack of conventional argument in the work of Johns’ students don’t seem to want to explore what his assignments are achieving. In concentrating on what isn’t there, they don’t look at what is or at the relationship between what is there and what the courses in question should be trying to do. The haphazard approach to evaluating his teaching is even more evident in the fact that, when two committee members had difficulty loading an assignment on their machines because of a missing Java plug-in, they don’t seem to have made any effort to get access to a machine that had the necessary plug-in.

What are the responsibilities of the Dean?  Which did she/he fulfill?  Fail?

There isn’t much mention of the Dean in the entire case, which could signal the form that his or her failure takes. That is, it’s not clear that he or she is exercising any oversight to ensure that probationary faculty in his or her College are getting the guidance needed for them to succeed. At many campuses, the Department Chair and the Dean discuss the progress of probationary faculty member on an annual or biannual basis, but that does not seem to have been the case here. If the case had been developed further and there was some reaction from the Dean or the College personnel committee to the recommendation coming from the department personnel committee, the extent to which the Dean and the College met their responsibilities might be more evident.

What are Johns’ responsibilities?  Which did she/he fulfill?  Fail?

Johns’ first and foremost responsibility is to apprise himself of the Department’s and College’s standards for promotion and tenure and to ensure that the work he is doing addresses these standards. He seems to have failed in this fundamental task. Mostly, he seems to focus on those things that interest him without considering their relationship to his progress toward tenure and promotion. This is evident in the description of his approach to getting his dissertation published. Although he can’t find a publisher to give him a contract, he is “loath to let the effort go.” When he does find an online publishing concern that will publish the manuscript, he pursues the opportunity without considering very carefully how the publication would be factored into his tenure and promotion review.

The same pattern seems evident in his work on the Department lab. This seems to be something he enjoys doing, but he also finds it takes more time than he anticipated in that he spends his weekends in the lab with his thirty technical consultants “troubleshooting machines, installing new software, and training the new consultants.” While Johns is to blame for allowing himself to be so absorbed by this work, the Department shares the blame by having given him an assignment that everyone should have known would place huge demands on his time, demands that would interfere with his ability to do the scholarship necessary for a favorable tenure and promotion decision.

I suspect that Jared enjoys working on graduate student committees so that here, too, he allows himself to be swallowed up by the task (in four years, he has served on sixteen Master’s level committees and eight Ph.D. committees). That he has invested himself too much in this work is evident by the fact that the Director of Graduate Studies has had to talk with him to tell him to cut down on committee work.

In all of this, Johns is doing valuable work, but he overdoes it and allows himself to become invested disproportionately in work that will not figure correspondingly into his tenure and promotion review.

What went wrong?  What went right?

I suspect that the fundamental problem here is a lack of communication between Johns and the Department, which would include a failure to make the standards for promotion clear from the beginning and a failure to attend to these standards in the work completed over the four years in which Johns has been in this position. The publication standard is clear when the personnel committee is reviewing Johns’ record (six peer-reviewed articles in first- or second-tier journals). However, it’s not clear that Jared understands this standard from the outset, and there’s no evidence that the Department is communicating the standard to him during his probationary period. Depending on how one counts the articles in conference proceedings, Johns could be very far from this standard or closer but still far enough away to precipitate a stern warning about what he should be publishing in the remaining years of his probationary period.

The Department doesn’t seem to have provided the mentoring that would have increased the chances that Johns would have tailored his work during his probationary period to the Department’s expectations. The only communication that seems to occur is the occasional statement from the Chair or the Director of Graduate studies rather than a sustained mentoring that would have guided Jared away from the excessive investments in some activities that interfered with, because of their excessive demands on his time and energy,  rather than advanced his progress toward tenure and promotion.

For Johns’ part, he worked at things that were of obvious value to the Department (his service is judged to be good during his fourth-year review), but he should have familiarized himself with the standards for promotion and tenure and examined all of his work through the lens of these standards. That means that, rather than persisting with a book-length manuscript that was obviously meeting with some resistance, for example, he should have been directing his energies toward publications that would have more readily enhanced his scholarly record. It also means that he should have worked at his teaching to ensure that he used technology to enhance his pedagogy rather than persisting with approaches that seemed to create problems from the beginning. There is no evidence that he followed up on the Chair’s suggestions to meet with the Director of the Center for Teaching Excellence nor is there evidence that he worked at his teaching to ensure that problems in one semester were addressed in a subsequent semester. He served as a listserv moderator on technology and pedagogy hoping that doing so would benefit his teaching; however, it’s not clear what he did with the knowledge he gathered to make his teaching better. He doesn’t seem to have learned from the tenure and promotion guidelines that his teaching would have to improve from where it began at the outset of his probationary period.

Introduction to the 2014 Annual

by Clancy Ratliff

• Downloadable PDF of the report.
• Downloadable Word Document of the report.
• Table of Contents

This issue marks ten years since the Intellectual Property Caucus and Intellectual Property Committee started publishing the CCCC-IP Annual. I’m proud to say that it has steadily grown since the first issue. While I do not have data about our readership, I can say that the number of articles has increased over time:

2005: three articles
2006: four articles
2007: six articles
2008: four articles
2009: nine articles
2010: nine articles
2011: six articles
2012: seven articles
2013: seven articles
2014 – this year’s issue: ten articles

We have also made progress as a field in our thinking about authorship, copyright, and intellectual property, particularly in the area of open access. At the March 2015 meeting of the CCCC-IP Caucus, Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), spoke to us about several developments in open access research and publishing. She mentioned the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC-BY) as the most progressive standard of open access, allowing not only copying and distribution of published research, but the uses now possible with new research methods enabled by software code, such as data visualization and topic modeling. For fully open access, as well as for accessibility (for example, creating audio recordings of the CCCC-IP Annual for people with particular disabilities) derivative works should be allowed. Since 2007, we have used the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial Use-No Derivative Works license, which is really only one step up from fair use: readers simply had permission to copy and distribute the full CCCC-IP Annual. We have now decided, though, to adopt a CC-BY license.

The Caucus and the Committee continue to work to keep the CCCC membership informed about intellectual property issues that work in favor of, or against, the interests of students and teachers, and readers and writers more generally. We recently applied for and received status as a CCCC Standing Group, and at the 2014 CCCC, we presented a panel about the history of the Caucus and our accomplishments. Many, many articles, book chapters, books, and special issues of journals have come out of Caucus meetings, as well as campus-specific advocacy. However, we still have work to do on several fronts, both legal and pedagogical. One of particular interest to me is plagiarism detection services, which I want to re-frame, as we go into the second half of 2015, as automated plagiarism detection. The Caucus proposed a CCCC resolution about the use of plagiarism detection services, which was passed in 2013:

Whereas CCCC does not endorse PDSs;

Whereas plagiarism detection services can compromise academic integrity by potentially undermining students’ agency as writers, treating all students as always already plagiarists, creating a hostile learning environment, shifting the responsibility of identifying and interpreting source misuse from teachers to technology, and compelling students to agree to licensing agreements that threaten their privacy and rights to their own intellectual property;

Whereas plagiarism detection services potentially negatively change the role of the writing teacher; construct ill-conceived notions of originality and writing; disavow the complexities of writing in and with networked, digital technologies; and treat students as non-writers; and

Whereas composition teacher-scholars can intervene and combat the potential negative influences of PDSs by educating colleagues about the realities of plagiarism and the troubling outcomes of using PDSs; advocating actively against the adoption of such services; modeling and sharing ideas for productive writing pedagogy; and conducting research into alternative pedagogical strategies to address plagiarism, including honor codes and process pedagogy;

BE IT THEREFORE RESOLVED that the Conference on College Composition and Communication commends institutions who offer sound pedagogical alternatives to the use of PDSs and encourages institutions who use PDSs to implement practices that are in the best interest of their students, including notifying students at the beginning of the term that the service will be used; providing students a non-coercive and convenient opt-out process; and inviting students to submit drafts to the service before turning in final text.

While the above resolution represents what many of us agree to be the case about plagiarism detection services, of which Turnitin is the main PDS provider, there is also this grim but correct observation from Rebecca Moore Howard, posted on the Writing Program Administration listserv (emphasis in original):

Turnitin has become like abortion and the death penalty: A topic on which people are making decisions based on deeply held beliefs inaccessible to logos. I visit faculties at several campuses every year, and in each audience are instructors who cannot imagine teaching without Turnitin. I am in a post-debate state with such people, unwilling any longer to search for the common ground on which we will exchange principles and consider possibilities, at the end of which these folks will return to Mother Turnitin against all reason. I just tell folks why I don’t use it, and turn to another topic. No one has ever said to me, “You know, I thought about what you said, and I changed my practice.” No one.

IIn tandem with the discourse about Turnitin is the discourse about the Common Core State Standards Initiative and its assessments of writing, which according to some reports are set to use AES, or Automated Essay Scoring. Teachers and administrators in K-12 and higher education, as well as students and parents, have expressed serious concerns about this plan. I see an opportunity to re-frame plagiarism detection services in order to show what those of us studying intellectual property and composition have understood for years: that AES and PDS are basically the same – artificial reading that replaces quality instruction and contextualized feedback on student writing. Hence I propose automated plagiarism detection. Also, because I included image macros (known more commonly as memes, though these are only one kind of meme) in the introduction of last year’s CCCC-IP Annual, I will end with these two image macros I created for the occasion. Though facetious, they are yet a potent way to communicate a point.

    

Table of Contents
1	Introduction to the 2014 CCCC-IP Annual Clancy Ratliff
5	Plagiarism and PTSD: The Case of Senator John Walsh’s Plagiarized Paper Steven Engel, Kerry Howell, Jacklene Johnson, and Jessica McGinnis
11	What We Can Learn from Two Plagiarism Accusations in 2014: Slavoj Žižek’s and Nic Pizzolatto’s Summer Scandals Wendy Warren Austin
18	3D Printing and Patent Theft: New Challenges to the Creative Commons Chet Breaux
21	Keep on Keeping On: Georgia State Fair Use Case Faces a New Metric for Assessing Fair Use Jeffrey R. Galin
30	Open Data, Environmental Conservation, and the Digital Humanities: Mapping the Mangroves Amy D. Propen
34	Another Piece in the Open-Access Puzzle: The California Taxpayer Access to Publicly Funded Research Act (AB609) Karen Lunsford
38	Will Taylor Swift and Spotify Ever Get Back Together? Laurie Cubbison
42	The Case of the Missing Copyright: Sherlock Holmes and the Acerbic Judge Kim Dian Gainer
52	How the Law Can Cost Composition Instructors a Lot of Money, and What You Can Do About It: The EFF’s White Paper on Civil Penalties for Copyright Infringement Mike Edwards
55	Review: The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz (2014) Traci A. Zimmerman
60	Contributors

 

(Note: These are mostly links to onsite conference hosts, although for 2009 and 2010, the online and online conferences were hosted by the same institution. Links will be added as they become available for the online conferences.)

2023: UC Davis (Carl Whithaus and Kory Lawson Ching)
2022: East Carolina U (Will Banks, Michelle Eble, and Erin Frost)
2020-21: No conference
2019: Michigan State U (Bill Hart-Davidson, Kristin Arola, and Dànielle DeVoss)
2018: George Mason U (Douglas Eyman)
2017: U of Findlay (Elkie Burnside)
2016: St. John Fisher College (Wendi Sierra)
2015: U of Wisconsin, Stout (Daniel Ruefman)
2014: Washington State U (Mike Edwards, Patricia Ericsson, Kristin Arola and Bill Condon)
2013: Frostburg State U (Jill Morris)
2012: North Carolina State U, Raleigh (Susan Miller-Cochran and Wendi Sierra)
2011: U of Michigan (Anne Gere and Naomi Silver)
2010: Purdue U (David Blakesley)
2009: UC–Davis (Carl Whithaus)
2008: U of Georgia (Christy Desmet, Neson Hilton, and Ron Balthazor)
2007: Wayne State U (Jeff Rice, Richard Marback, and Jeff Pruchnik)
2006: Texas Tech U (Rich Rice)
2005: Stanford University (Corinne Arraez)
2004: U of Hawaii and Kapi’olani Community College (Judi Kirkpatrick, Darin Payne and John Zuern)
2003: Purdue U (David Blakesley)
2002: Illinois State U (Ron Fortune and James Kalmbach)
2001: Ball State U (Linda Hanson and Rich Rice)
2000: Texas Women’s U (Dene Grigar, John Barber, and Hugh Burns)
1999: South Dakota School of Mines and Technology (Michael Day)
1998: U of Florida (Anthony Rue)
1997: Kapi’olani Community College (Judi Kirkpatrick)
1996: Utah State U (Christine Hult)
1995: U of Texas, El Paso (Evelyn Posey)
1994: U of Missouri, Columbia (Eric Crump)
1993: U of Michigan (Bill Condon)
1992: Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (Helen Schwartz, Linda Hanson, and Web Newbold)
1991: U of Southern Mississippi (Rae Schipke)
1990: U of Texas (Fred Kemp, John Slatin, Wayne Butler, and Locke Carter)
1989: U of Minnesota (Geoff Sirc and Trent Batson)
1987-88 No conference
1986: U of Pittsburgh (Glynda Hull)
1985: U of California, Los Angeles (Lisa Gerrard)
1984: U of Minnesota (Donald Ross)
1983: U of Minnesota (Lillian Bridwell-Bowles)