Dear Friends and Colleagues,
We are writing to share the SGSLR (The Senior, Late-Career, and Retired Professionals in Rhetoric, Composition and Writing Studies) Solidarity Statement. Please feel free to share this widely and we are eager to hear from anyone who is interested in becoming more engaged with our intergenerational work and our community. We will be sponsoring an Ideation Symposium, possibly in concert with the LifeSpan group, in early October and will send out more specifics shortly.
In Solidarity, The SGSLR Leadership
August 13, 2026
Solidarity Statement:
Senior, Late-Career, and Retired Professionals in Rhetoric, Composition, and Writing Studies (SGSLR)
OnJuly 24, 2026, the Executive Committee of the National Council of Teachers of English announced the decision to de-charter CCCC. With that decision, SGSLR, an officially recognized CCCC Standing Group since 2019, was terminated by NCTE. In this statement, we write to express our solidarity with the broaderRhetoric and Composition/Writing Studies(RCWS) community, of which SGSLR is a part, displaced by this NCTE decision.
Since 1949, CCCC has been a hub of theoretical and applied work central to the knowledge and practices that constitute our profession. CCCC cultivated a distinctive focus on advancing opportunities to learn for all our diverse students, centering conversations on learning (and learning from each other) in its conferences and publications.
We characterize the NCTE announcement as an instance of bureaucratized communication—offensive, dehumanizing, and dismissive–and its decision, unwarranted. While the SGSLR recognizes that RCWS lives in each member of our profession both past and present, we mourn the deep loss and significant damage to our whole community resulting from this action. As senior, late-career, and retired professionals, many of us have experienced CCCC as our principal community across several decades. We have witnessed the ways in which CCCC’s conferences, publications, networks of relationships, and collective institutional memory have welcomed many generations of RCWS colleagues, introducing graduate students and early-career scholars into the RCWS community, and sustaining them across the full trajectory of their/ our careers. Our perspective as long-term members of the profession carries with it a unique responsibility for documenting what has been built, recognizing what is presently at risk, and adopting a stance of affiliation to sustain the multi-generational relationships and diverse practices so foundational to our profession.
We are aligned with the WAC Clearinghouse efforts to voicesolidarity andcoordinate a new home (or homes) to sustain the vitality of our profession and our lives in this profession. Through theLifespan Writing Research series and other projects, SGSLR members will continue their collaboration with the Clearinghouse and the National Archives of Composition and Rhetoric to curate a wide range of theoretical, methodological, and philosophical perspectives related to evolving, relational, ecological, multi-generational, and identity-forming activities.
For our part, the SGSLR will advance the following foundational concepts in our new homes to come:
● SGSLR holds that RCWS is not solely a succession of generations in which one generation must disappear for another to flourish. We are a lifespan intellectual community: we understand that knowledge, responsibility, memory, collaboration, and care must circulate within and across generations for human flourishing.
● SGSLR commits to ongoing preservation of the profession in all its aspects as central to our collective future. We will continue to advocate for the human, material, and technical resources required for preservation of our pan-historiographic histories.
● SGSLR commits to cross-generational connections, with special attention to graduate students and professionals in the field, and including collaborations with K–12 students and professionals, two-year college students and professional/technical writing.
● SGSLR commits to acknowledging those retiring from their professional positions and memorializing those who have passed on, honoring their contributions to our community and our field.
As initially expressed in the work of the SGSLRTask Force on Cross-Generational Connections (2014–2018), RCWS scholars across all generations benefit from a central point of connection. At the present moment, SGSLR pledges to serve as a generational and generative nexus for our profession in collaboration with – and in accompaniment with – all other efforts to sustain and re-constitute it.
This statement has been collaboratively composed by the following members of SGSLR. We encourage readers to circulate it to all who may be interested.
Kathleen Shine Cain
Norbert Elliot
Cinthia Gannett
Alice Horning
Libby Falk Jones
Bill Lalicker
Jim McDonald
Louise Wetherbee Phelps
Donna Qualley
Shirley Rose
Joel Wingard