NCTE Dissolves 77-Year-Old Composition Association

The National Council of Teachers of English executive committee voted Friday to dissolve the Conference on College Composition and Communication—CCCC, or often called the “4Cs”—and absorb its approximately 2,500 members into the broader college section of the council. CCCC members learned about the plan on social media on Thursday morning and spent the following 24 hours rallying against the decision. They argue it will severely weaken composition instruction in higher ed.

In an emailed statement to Inside Higher Ed, the NCTE executive committee cited struggles with “fiscal sustainability, declining participation and governance challenges” as the impetus to decharter the organization.

“The process in making this decision spanned several years, with attempts to work collaboratively with CCCC’s executive committees across multiple iterations. While the organization appreciates the years of collaboration with CCCC, after deep evaluation and thoughtful consideration, the Executive Committee concluded this step was necessary to more effectively serve the college English and writing and composition community and NCTE membership as a whole,” the committee wrote.

Established in 1949, CCCC is the largest professional organization for researching and teaching composition in the world, according to its website. It publishes what members say is the pre-eminent journal in the field—College Composition and Communication—and hosts an annual convention for writing faculty. CCCC members will remain part of NCTE, which is made up of elementary, middle, secondary and college sections.

Melissa Ianetta, a now-former CCCC officer and executive director of writing and communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology, told Inside Higher Ed she first learned of NCTE’s plan to end the conference on Wednesday afternoon during a meeting with several NCTE officials. During the meeting, Ianetta and one other CCCC officer were told the “culture” of CCCC threatened NCTE’s nonprofit status. She did not receive further explanation about what that meant, she said.

Ianetta resigned on the spot. The next morning, she posted about the meeting on Facebook.

“I did not sign up to butcher the organization,” she wrote. “I am no longer an officer of that organization and, if I can get them to give back the years of membership dues I paid in advance, I will [no] longer be a member.”

Many CCCC members have speculated online about what the cultural schism between the organizations might be; some said that it could be disagreements over public statements on the war in Gaza—a topic that has divided other academic associations in recent years. Others wonder if the organizations’ differing stances on artificial intelligence could have factored into NCTE’s decision.

In its statement, the NCTE executive committee wrote that it heard from “many members of the community” and that “a transition team focused on supporting composition, rhetoric and writing studies will be named by the NCTE Executive Committee imminently.”

Doug Hesse, a professor emeritus of writing and English at the University of Denver who has held leadership roles at both NCTE and CCCC, said he “utterly and truly [does] not” know what kind of culture the NCTE executives might have been referring to when they spoke to Ianetta.

Hesse said he’s familiar with some of CCCC’s financial troubles, and “those look serious and compelling to me.” But he also said the organization had “fairly ample reserves.”

“This is why you have reserves,” he said. “I was aware of some efforts to really get the organization to revise its budget. I completely did not anticipate it resulting in … a recommendation to dissolve the organization.”

Over the past year, CCCC leaders suggested a variety of revenue-raising mechanisms, including income-based tiered membership fees, the option to earmark NCTE donations specifically for CCCC and partnering with universities for financial support. All of the suggestions were dismissed by NCTE staff, according to a source familiar with CCCC governance who wished to remain anonymous for fear of retribution. On July 15, the CCCC executive committee presented cuts to NCTE that closed the budget gap, but “that was not acceptable,” the source said.

The dissolution of CCCC is “incredibly destructive to the field,” said Hesse, “and more importantly, to the hundreds of thousands of American college students who have been taught by professors who have relied on the CCCC as their main source of professional information and research on writing and the teaching of writing.”

In a public letter, Rhetoric Society of America officials said they were “shocked and dismayed” to learn CCCC was dissolved.

“4Cs’ seventy-seven-year history of leadership in composition pedagogy and its status as an intellectual home for writing studies and literacy scholars cannot be erased,” they wrote. “We believe that the organization’s members and leadership deserve a transparent, democratic process for determining its future.”

For Daniel Libertz, an English professor at the City University of New York’s Baruch College, the end of CCCC is a “huge, huge loss.”

“I lose out in a lot of ways by not seeing the latest innovations in teaching and scholarship,” he said. “But I’m even more concerned about other people who lose out, including my own students.”

“We’re at a public school where we don’t have a lot of resources. We serve vulnerable student populations, lots of working-class students and immigrants or children of immigrants, people of color—they lose out, too, without the resources CCCC provides to us.”