[CBW_Exec] new members for CBW Executive Board?

[Shannon Carter]

Hi, all--

This may not be the time to start thinking/talking about this (or even the right forum), but I wanted to put forward a name for a new (potential) member of our board. She'd be very interested, and she's done some great work in the history of basic writing--most recently in CCC. 

It's Kelly Ritter at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. More at http://www.uncg.edu/eng/graduate/info/rhetcomp.html . Her second book, Before Shaughnessy: Basic Writing at Yale and Harvard, 1920-1960, promises to make an enduring contribution to the field (Studies in Writing and Rhetoric/SIU Press, 2009). She's great to work with, committed to students, and very active in our various professional organizations. 

Those of you with more time in the organization, can you tell me how this works? Is this something we vote on when we get together in March? Should we bring a slate of potentials to the table? We may be thinking more strategically about our EB already. I know we want a nice, diverse makeup. At some point we may wish to begin discussing ways to bring the EB choices to the CBW membership more broadly, adopting a model like WPA and CCCC (with nominations from the membership sorted through a nomination committee and then paired for general election). We could manage such an election at our new website (ready and published at http://orgs.tamu-commerce.edu/cbw very soon). That is, we could manage the technical side of things.  If the EB decides that is a route we want to go. 

I suspect I'm not the first to suggest such a thing and that there are very good reasons for not going this way. I'm a relative newbie, so I hope those of you with some more time in CBW will bring those details forward as well. One major complication would be that if we do a regular election we likely will have to have term limits, and we'd want to stagger them (as do the models above) so there's lots of longevity represented in the group. But we already have that with the current model, so a very valid response to this is "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." Amen! 

In any case, the question I'm really wanting to ask at this point is about Kelly as potential member and current structure for taking nominations. We can table the other and probably should. I can raise it at our meeting if it seems like something we think worth pursuing soon or at some point in the future. 

For reference (just nominated for the CCCC EB and thought this might be a useful rubric for a growing organization like ours): 
"At the CCCC Convention in March, the Nominating Committee will prepare the final slate of candidates for the 2009 voting ballot. The committee will rely on several sources of information: (1) CCCC guidelines for balanced representation in elected offices, including region, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation [if the person wishes it known], type of institution, tenure and non-tenure track, full-time and part-time employment; (2) the members’ personal knowledge of each candidate; and (3) documentation that you submit, including biographical data, curriculum vitae, and related material you wish to put forward [neither Nominating Committee members nor NCTE staff can solicit such materials]. Overall, please refrain from submitting more material than the Nominating Committee members can absorb about each potential candidate in the relatively brief time they will have before the convention. Should you decide to continue with the nomination process, please submit your information via email to ksuchor at ncte.org. (excerpted from nomination letter, dated 12/9)

Hope everyone's semesters have been excellent ones and you aren't just buried under paperwork. 

Thanks!
Shannon

Shannon Carter
Associate Professor of English
Texas A&M-Commerce
shannon_carter at tamu-commerce.edu
http://faculty.tamu-commerce.edu/scarter/
903-886-5492

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