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First-year composition is the closest thing American higher education has to a universal course. One study, from the early 2000s, estimated that among those who eventually earned bachelor’s degrees, 85 percent took it at some point. An estimated 2.4 million to 2.8 million students take composition each year, with 96 percent of four-year institutions having a first-year writing requirement. It’s against this background that the National Council of Teachers of English voted last month to dissolve the Conference on College Composition and Communication, the largest professional organization in writing studies.
Of the 77 years CCCC existed, this is the worst one to be without it. Generative AI disrupted composition more than any other subject, because a free LLM can produce prose at a quality that will often pass the course. Worse, the oft-proffered solution of timed writing exams is exactly the practice composition research has spent decades moving away from. CCCC itself has a position statement arguing that a single timed essay is a poor measure of whether a student can write, and that approaches involving portfolios and multiple readers are preferable. That is why the modern course runs on sequences of drafts rather than the timed in-person essay.
Many in the field see the mass adoption of generative AI as existential. In March, at CCCC’s convention in Cleveland, composition teachers voted overwhelmingly to affirm a right to refuse generative AI in their classrooms. Meanwhile, 74 percent of faculty report students using AI to write papers, and Gallup found last October that 36 percent use it at least weekly to write papers and 54 percent use it to edit or improve their writing.
To address this, CCCC and the Modern Language Association convened a joint task force on writing and AI in December 2022, which published guidance. Computers and Composition highlighted the emerging role of AI in a special issue marking 40 years of composing with computers in June, and Literacy in Composition Studies issued a call for a special issue on generative AI and marginalized writers in early 2025.
But scholarship is slow by design, and that is usually a virtue. A study begun this fall would clear a review board, run an academic year, then go through analysis and peer review before appearing in print around 2029. The special issues arriving now describe classroom pilots from 2024, back when LLMs were far weaker products than the ones students are using today. The field’s most rigorous research is defining best practices for products that, in effect, no longer exist.
A conference works on a different clock. Its proposals are short, its review is light and work can be presented while still underway, so a teacher who tries something in January can test it against colleagues within the year. It also widens who gets heard. Presenters at CCCC included instructors at two-year colleges, adjuncts, graduate students and program directors, people deeply involved with composition who rarely publish. Many pay their own way, and the organization offered part-time and adjunct instructors a bundled registration and travel stipend through its Professional Equity Project to encourage participation across the academy.
But now the conference and other mainstays are uncertain. NCTE de-chartered CCCC on July 24, stopped selling new College Composition and Communication subscriptions on July 31 and named a transition team due to report by June 30, 2027. The NCTE executive committee will announce by Aug. 31 whether the Milwaukee convention set for April 14 to 17 will be held and what travel grants and awards may be available. A conference that several hundred people have already submitted proposals for may not happen.
Other organizations remain, among them the Two-Year College English Association and NCTE’s own college section, which NCTE describes as thriving. Both are smaller, and neither convenes the field the way a single national meeting did. Both also sit inside NCTE, the organization whose judgment is now the question. In fact, more than 1,100 members of the writing studies community, among them former CCCC chairs and former NCTE presidents, have since signed a statement saying NCTE is not a good steward.
We have little doubt that composition scholars will find a new venue, but not quickly. Two things could be done before any successor emerges. The first is to keep an annual meeting on the calendar. Hold the April 2027 convention, for which proposals are already submitted and under review. Then, issue a call for 2028 this spring. A CCCC call for proposals goes out roughly a year ahead, so an April 2028 meeting needs a call by about March 2027, well before a new organization will have written its founding principles. Although the NCTE machinery may no longer be available, other organizations have already offered to help. The WAC Clearinghouse has volunteered to publish the journals and sponsor the conference, and the Writing About Writing Network has announced they are securing a venue for a panel in 2027. A provisional call would keep the conversation going while the infrastructural logistics re-form.
The second is for scholars to leverage a faster way to publish. Physicists have posted preprints to arXiv since 1991, and many fields now do the same so findings circulate during the peer-review process. Composition needs faster-turnaround research now more than ever, and the venues already exist. EdArXiv takes education research and accepts conference papers and work still under review. Knowledge Commons already hosts rhetoric and composition groups, and it is where the MLA and CCCC task force put its own AI working papers. This is the easiest moment we will ever have to adopt norms that will not put so much of the field’s output in the hands of one organization.
Building whatever replaces CCCC will take years. Meanwhile, close to three million students will start their composition classes in a few weeks. It’s a tragedy to lose such a mainstay in a field that affects nearly every college student, but it’s also an opportunity to reform for the better.
