a few more 4Cs observations

• Duku Anokye’s keynote address, “Voices: The Company We Keep,” set a tone for the conference that I found surprisingly exclusionary. Anokye is an engaging speaker, weaving personal anecdote skillfully into her keynote address without making the speech more about her than about “the company we keep.” During the 2006 conference, she interviewed 20+ conference participants, including 4Cs leadership and conference newcomers; in her keynote address, she reported on what she learned through this ethnographic research about what 4Cs members see as strengths and weaknesses of the organization. While I appreciate the concept of her research and I also understand the limitations of ethnographic research, I was very disappointed that she didn’t appear to have interviewed anyone associated with a two-year college. My major disappointment, however, comes from what I see as a flaw in her methodology. She claimed that she wanted to find out about “the company we keep” and she did draw some observations about the organization as a whole from the interviews she conducted; however, although she seemed to mean all members of CCCC when she spoke of “the company we keep,” since she interviewed only people who were at CCCC 2006, her research couldn’t possibly take into account people who are members of CCCC but have stopped attending the conference. Her methodology implies that the people who attend the annual conference are more important that the people who can’t afford the conference or who work for institutions that don’t support travel. Ironically, one criticism of the organization that came out of her research is that while we talk about the importance of fighting for better wages and conditions for contingent workers, the conference is often at an expensive hotel that those workers could never afford. Another important observation she made is that the organization doesn’t take action often enough (why aren’t our members testifying before Congress when issues relating to higher education are debated?).
• If graduate students are going to be encouraged to present at the conference, either 4Cs or their home institutions should take some responsibility for helping them present competently. Taking 25 minutes when you are allotted 20, reading a paper like a stoned drone, eating during another presenter’s talk (OK, that wasn’t a graduate student, that was actually a senior member of the profession), and being clearly unprepared to chair a session (do ask ahead of time how to pronounce the names of the presenters you’ll be introducing) are mistakes that may seem obvious in hindsight, but to a nervous graduate student (or any first-time presenter), they aren’t so obvious.
• The practice of putting participants' institutions on their name badges assumes that all members of the profession have an institutional affiliation. Some of us are independent scholars, some have multiple affiliations, and some are alienated enough from their institution that they may not want to wear the name around their neck for three days. And, I should add that several times I have been talking to people at a conference who abruptly lost interest in our conversation when they noticed that I am affiliated with a community college.

tags: cccc  conference  community_college  composition  

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