The Collapse of a Flagship Organization

Two years ago, I left academia as an associate professor of rhetoric and composition. I still love rhetoric. I just stopped trusting a field that increasingly treated reason, argument, and ideological disagreement as forms of oppression, and consistently policed my behavior based on identity. Now the field’s flagship organization, the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), has been de-chartered (euthanized?) by its parent organization, the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).

NCTE cites years of declining participation, fiscal instability, and governance problems, all noted in the CCCC’s own 2024 Executive Committee meeting minutes. Those failures did not arise from an intellectual void; CCCC’s demise was substantially self-inflicted. An academic organization cannot narrow its mission, alienate dissenters, drift away from teachers’ practical needs, and then treat its loss of participation as an inexplicable bad luck.

Colleagues accused me of upholding white supremacy and suffering from a kind of “Stockholm Syndrome,” as though a Black professor dissenting from the approved racial doctrine must have internalized his oppressor. The insult revealed the field’s governing logic. It would be one thing if I had been ostracized for mistreating students or falsifying research.  But I was punished for refusing a prescribed racial role. A field that advertised itself as committed to marginalized voices treated a Black scholar’s independent judgment as pathology. Was the hypocrisy lost on them, or was I just not a real Black person. As it turned out, it was the latter.  Eventually, I left my professorship and, effectively, the discipline.

CCCC was supposed to be concerned primarily with how people write, argue, persuade, deliberate, and communicate. That work should be indispensable in a pluralistic civil society, especially when that society is experiencing significant polarization. Free speech provides the right to speak; rhetorical education provides the skills to do it well. This helps us coexist with people whose consciences lead them elsewhere. Yet rhetoric and composition seems to have flipped the script. Instead of asking how people who disagree can reason together, more and more the field asked how language could advance a particular and increasingly illiberal conception of justice. The first mission requires argument and openness to revision. The second can reduce scholarship to activism and disagreement to moral impurity.

CCCC’s own priorities make the drift difficult to deny. It’s 2027 convention call foregrounded justice-oriented design, systemic oppression, racial retrenchment, anti-carceral practices, mutual aid, and decolonization. These are all worthwhile concepts to study. Yet, terms like “argument,” “persuasion,” “debate,” and “deliberation” did not appear. That is remarkable for the premier organization of a field bearing the name “rhetoric.”  Those missing terms identify the civil practices through which free people manage disagreement. Arguments are supposed to require reasons, expose claims to objections, and compare possible actions, in a good-faith attempt to seek voluntary assent—a lofty but necessary goal. A field that neglects these practices may teach students to identify injustice within one approved framework, but not defend that framework to skeptics or revise it when evidence demands. Those things should be sine qua non in any academic field.

Now many members are trying to build a self-contained successor organization. This is not necessarily a bad thing; independence could permit a more inclusive renewal. That said, it could also remove the remaining external checks on a field already prone to ideological conformity. That is where a cult-like discipline could become something closer to a bona fide cult.

A scholarly association is supposed to treat its standards as contestable, and revisable. A cult establishes a sacred vocabulary, grants insiders authority to define purity, treats dissent as moral contamination, and makes exclusion proof of virtue. If the same people who cultivated CCCC’s insularity now build an institution in which they, alone, make the rules, may produce an insular bubble full of people incapable of hearing criticism because they have defined criticism, itself, as violence.

So, if you are still wondering where I stand on this issue, I believe CCCC deserves its reckoning. (Some claim that NCTE feared pressure from the Trump Administration after an anti-Israel communication associated with CCCC, but neither NCTE nor any federal agency has publicly confirmed that account.)

Generally. I want to be clear that not every member deserves professional displacement. I also know that losing a professional home can be painful. But institutions are accountable for the purposes they abandon and the people they drive away. I was one of them.

CCCC did not merely suffer from a changing academic landscape. It helped create the conditions of its own demise!