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The National Council of Teachers of English leadership delayed and obstructed our efforts to produce two critical resources on generative AI in the months leading to the dismantling of the Conference on College Composition and Communication.
By Jennifer Sano-Franchini , Kofi Adisa , Megan McIntyre and Maggie Fernandes
da-kuk/iStock/Getty Images Plus
On July 24, the National Council of Teachers of English executive committee abruptly announced its decision to decharter the Conference on College Composition and Communication, the largest academic professional organization dedicated to college composition and writing studies. In an announcement posted to its website, NCTE leadership cited “fiscal sustainability, declining participation and governance challenges” as justification for the sudden dismantling of a 77-year-old organization. Yet, the process by which this decision was made and announced has left many of us wondering if this statement is not a seemingly justifiable cover for other reasons NCTE leadership would prefer to keep behind closed doors.
For instance, just two days before the announcement, NCTE leadership reportedly told CCCC officers that the “culture” of CCCC was a threat to NCTE’s nonprofit status. Although there may be no way to know what precisely NCTE leadership meant when they made this statement (NCTE has not publicly provided additional context or clarification), we cannot help but think back to our experiences as members of the CCCC Special Committee on Generative AI in College Composition and Writing Studies. At the center of these experiences were our efforts to develop and make available two resources on generative AI that the committee believed would support both teachers and students in college writing courses. We faced almost a year of delays, challenges and attempts to undermine our work before the CCCC was unceremoniously dechartered.
The two resources that were at the center of these experiences were:
Both of these documents were developed by our committee of 11 teacher scholars—some of us writing program administrators—from a range of institution types who have expertise in different areas of rhetoric, composition and writing studies and who hold a variety of perspectives regarding generative AI. The special committee was announced in June 2025 and spent months working on and revising these documents. We were especially committed to ensuring that they would be usable by teacher scholars who may take a range of positions with regard to generative AI in the classroom.
What we think is notable about these documents is the way they foreground student and teacher choice, including the ability to opt out of the use of generative AI in the classroom. We believed it was critical that the documents insist on student-centered pedagogy at a time when students are too often doubted and denigrated as cheaters. Importantly, these documents refuse to repeat marketing claims about this technology that are rooted in AI hype or to separate ethical concerns from the functionality of these products.
We eventually submitted the documents for review by the CCCC executive committee, a 28-person governing body charged with reviewing and voting on documents such as the ones we provided. They provided feedback for revision and then voted to approve the documents on Oct. 2, 2025. From here, such documents are typically reviewed by NCTE before they are posted to the CCCC website. We expected, based on Kofi and Jennifer’s years of past experience with this process on the CCCC executive committee, that such a review would only take a few days, maybe a couple of weeks on the longer end.
But on Oct. 23, we received feedback from the NCTE presidential team raising concerns, including in regards to the use of specific company names (though their assertion that NCTE does not cite specific companies or products is not accurate). They raised concerns about “the reality of instructing students to opt out” of AI use, referencing situations where it may be “impossible or impractical to do so.” We felt that this was a disingenuous read of our documents, which did not instruct students to opt out but rather stated that students should have the right to opt out. Moreover, we would argue that the fact that some of us do not have a choice is exactly why our professional organizations should push for making this choice available to all.
In addition, the feedback we received requested more guidance to help students use generative AI “in appropriate and ethical ways.” To this end, they suggested that more useful framing might present AI as a “‘coconspirator’ and/or ‘ally’”—a position we find troubling for how it humanizes and encourages trust in LLM chatbots through the use of metaphorical language in ways that had been critiqued within our own disciplinary scholarship. Finally, they held that the documents should be inclusive of the range of perspectives regarding AI given our wide audience and purpose. We believed the documents succeeded in relation to the last point given that they did not encourage one blanket position with regard to generative AI but rather made refusal one viable option, among others, that readers might select.
Our special committee worked quickly to revise the documents in light of this feedback and developed a revision memo, which was shared on Nov. 11 with a member of the NCTE presidential team who had offered to provide feedback. We waited almost a month, following up a couple of times with no response, before we forwarded the revisions to the entire NCTE presidential team on Dec. 8.
The next day, we were alarmed to receive an email from NCTE announcing its partnership with Google.org, which provided a grant for NCTE to work with teachers to develop a framework for “responsible AI use” in the English language arts classroom. Applications were limited to English language arts teachers in grades six to 12 “who want to shape the future of AI in the field.” College instructors were not included in this initiative.
On Dec. 19, we were informed that the CCCC executive committee needed to review and vote on these documents a second time before the NCTE presidential team would do so. In addition, we were advised to give the CCCC executive committee until Jan. 12 to read the lightly revised documents. Although we felt that the revisions were not significant enough to merit a second vote, we complied and moved forward with this plan, and the CCCC executive committee voted to approve the two documents for a second time on Jan. 15. The documents were forwarded once again to the NCTE presidential team that same day.
From January to March, we heard nothing. The NCTE presidential team sat on our documents for months as the technological landscape for teachers and professors rapidly changed. Meanwhile, CCCC members were reaching out to us and other members of the special committee with questions about when the documents would be circulated by the organization.
With the annual CCCC convention coming up in March and with our documents stalled for an inordinate length of time, the four of us worked to draft a proposed resolution reaffirming the right of teachers and students to refuse to use generative AI in the teaching and learning of college writing. We worked independently of the special committee, as we had mere days to write the resolution and obtain signatures in time to meet the February deadline for resolutions. We needed at least five member signatures to present the proposed resolution at the annual business meeting. We gathered 266 signatures in one weekend.
We decided on a resolution for a couple of reasons. For one, we had heard from both students and teachers about the value of organizational support that would help them resist institutional pressures and mandates. In addition, we wanted to confirm our sense of member needs by getting an understanding of members’ actual perspectives on these issues through a vote. We hoped that if members approved of this resolution, it would give NCTE a more accurate sense of how CCCC members position themselves with regard to generative AI. And finally, resolutions do not require approval from the NCTE presidential team, and we would therefore be able to get a useful resource into members’ hands more quickly. In the end, the resolution was affirmed by an overwhelming majority of attendees at the CCCC’s annual business meeting on March 6.
Three weeks later, on March 26, our special committee followed up with NCTE yet again, noting that the two documents had been under review with the NCTE presidential team for more than two months. On March 27, we received word that the documents were approved by the NCTE presidential team, clearing the way for proofing.
Close to another two weeks went by before NCTE staff posted the documents to the CCCC website, but with several concerning changes—including the addition of a disclaimer to the end of both documents stating that the views expressed were those of the authors alone. Other changes included the addition of a lengthy preamble and a statement inviting feedback from CCCC members.
We found these changes highly concerning for several reasons. For one, these published versions were not the documents that were voted on and approved by the CCCC executive committee. Secondly, the additions differentiated the two documents from all of the other statements listed on the CCCC website; none of the other statements included a lengthy preamble or disclaimer added by NCTE. None of the other statements invited feedback from CCCC members.
When we objected to the preamble and suggested we would be more amenable to a footnote, NCTE staff converted the document from an HTML web page to a PDF. As a result, the footnote took up a significant proportion of the first page of the document, resulting in the same effect as the lengthy preamble; these formatting choices gave the impression that the documents could not stand on their own merit, instead requiring many caveats and qualifiers. Moreover, the conversion to a PDF exacerbated the problem given that none of the other statements were presented as a PDF—yet another example of differentiating these two documents from all the other CCCC statements.
In addition, both documents were reviewed, voted on and approved, twice, by the CCCC executive committee. Both were reviewed by the NCTE presidential team and revised based on their feedback. If these documents were merely our individual opinions, as the disclaimer suggested, why did we have to wait five months for the NCTE presidential team to mull over the documents? Together, these actions came across as an effort to continue to weaken the legitimacy and work of the special committee.
These complications led to the CCCC executive committee voting down the changes. NCTE staff promptly removed the documents from the website. Although the special committee once again worked quickly to address NCTE leaders’ concerns, our efforts went nowhere: CCCC was dechartered three months later and the documents remain absent from the CCCC website. In total, NCTE leaders delayed, dragged out, challenged and attempted to downgrade the two resources created by the Special Committee on Generative AI for nine months after they were first approved by the CCCC executive committee in October 2025.
We share this profoundly frustrating experience at length because we think it demonstrates how AI adoption and integration may seem like the prevailing perspective within higher education, yet this may well be because the efforts of those who are insisting on slow, critical and nuanced perspectives are being impeded through common organizational strategies of bureaucracy, neglect and silence. It also offers a concrete example of how AI adoptionist perspectives that emphasize “responsible” AI use are at times advanced by educational organizations as a result of financial incentives, and not because these products are actually better for student learning (which none of NCTE’s materials that we have seen evince), nor because they are actually what organizational members want (as the 2026 CCCC resolution demonstrated). The loudest voices might not be the most correct, but simply the best funded or the best aligned with Big Tech imperatives.
We hope that sharing our experiences can shed light on some of the broad challenges of resisting the imposition of generative AI in education, even in academic professional organizations where ethical, research-based, pedagogically sound perspectives on generative AI should be actively supported. Instead, our experiences of being silenced, undermined and exhausted align with reports of how too many institutions of higher education as well as organizations attached to higher education (AFT, as another example) have bent the knee of Big Tech.
On Sept. 8, a “transition team” put together by NCTE to essentially coordinate the aftermath of the shuttering of CCCC announced, among other updates, that it will be engaging in efforts to “create resources for teaching digital literacy as a foundation for generative AI literacy in college writing courses, with special attention to students from diverse educational and linguistic backgrounds.” One can speculate as to why a committee tasked with transitioning and managing membership after the dechartering would be starting up yet another AI initiative with no communication or coordination with the existing special committee. We’re not sure about others, but we intend to seek out professional organizations that are not bought by Big Tech and that champion free speech, academic freedom and democratic participation. We invite you to do the same.
The authors are all members of the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s Special Committee on Generative AI in College Composition and Writing Studies.
Jennifer Sano-Franchini, co-chair of the special committee, is the Gaziano Family Legacy Professor of English at West Virginia University.
Kofi Adisa, co-chair of the special committee, is assistant director of the Writing Center at Towson University.
Megan McIntyre is an assistant professor and the director of the program in rhetoric and composition at the University of Arkansas.
Maggie Fernandes is an assistant professor of rhetoric and composition at the University of Arkansas.
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