to nca or not to nca? part one: rhetorical idiocy

Music: The Cure: Mixed Up (1990)

My national professional organization, the National Communication Association (NCA), has never not been a site of controversy. This semester for my graduate seminar we are reading a number of "historical" essays from its main organ, the newsletter Spectra, and it's easy to see squabbling was something of a norm (as were provocative essays). My comments in this entry participate in this long tradition.

For the next week I am trying to decide whether or not I shall attend NCA's national conference in San Francisco, and this is because submitted papers and panel proposals are due at the end of next week. I would rather not agree to appear on something or agree to respond to something if I have decided not to go. I will detail the reasons for going in a future post (there are many!). For the moment, however, I'd like detail my first reason for not going: the incompetence of figurehead leadership, represented most recently by outgoing NCA president Betsy Bach's final "presidential column." A good friend and trusted brain is close to Bach, and I underscore, again, I have no reason to believe she is not a good person. But I am a good person, and people disagree with me and get upset with things I say all the time, and while I'm a sensitive guy, I'm ok with this as long as it's not about my person, but my rhetoric. This said, as a figurehead Bach has made poor rhetorical choices, and this is not a good thing for a position that is, fundamentally, rhetorical in character. Moreover, given her scholarship's professed concern with "othering" from a self-identified feminist perspective, her words and deeds run the risk of hypocrisy. Let me explain.

A number of us boycotted the 2008 convention and criticized NCA for failing to respond to concerns about the NCA hotel---concerns that were voiced significantly before the conference and which the national office decided to remain strategically silent about (until it was too late to do anything). The owner of the conference hotel, self-styled Papa Manchester, is a supporter of proposition 8 and donated a lot of money to ban same-sex marriage (and more importantly, the legal benefits marriage entails) in California. Moreover, the hotel was embroiled in a labor dispute with his staff. This double-whammy led many NCA members to hold their panels and meetings in a hotel across the street that was queer and labor friendly. Organizers of the alternative conference (all good friends and respected colleagues of mine) called it the "UNconvention" to point up the irony of the official NCA conference theme, "unCONVENTIONal."

So what does this have to do with Bach's column? We have to go back to the beginning of Bach's term.

Rather than write a column expressing her views and policy initiatives---as most presidents who have gone before her have done---Prof. Bach decided to give her space to those in the field who felt "marginalized." She titled it "voices from the margins," and she kicked it off with a column by the outspoken conservative Richard Vatz. I will pass over commentary on Vatz's opinions, except to say that he believes, for example, affirmative action is racist.

After the 2008 conference, a number of folks who participated in the UNconvention drafted a report/statement, with the idea it would be great for Bach's "Voices from the Margins" column. Here was a group of folks who felt marginalized for their beliefs in sexual and martial equality, and the column seemed the ideal venue. After an initial query, to which Bach responded enthusiastically (underscoring a 1000 word limit), Bach changed her tone when she discovered it was not a personal reflection: "the intent of the column is to hear voices from the margins," she said, "rather than a report of the unconvention [sic], as that is not what I am looking for in my presidential columns. I am looking for personal accounts from people who feel 'marginalized.'" In an earlier missive, Bach suggested that what she is "shooting for is diverse perspectives and what I’m calling ‘voices from the margins’ of NCA. The people who have committed so far include a GLBT scholar, an African American scholar, an adjunct faculty member, a disabled NCA member, and many others."

Let us pass over the Forrest Gump "box of chocolates" approach to marginalization, as well as the underlying "victim" position that seems required for a spectral voice (not all spooks are wounded---some are pissed!). Let's simply reflect a minute on the purpose of a column titled "Voices from the Margins."

Okay.

Now, let us silently think over the reasons why some NCA members would be boycotting a convention hotel because its owner abuses his staff and is a bigot.

Thinking . . . thinking . . . .

It is in this context that we must take-up, then, Prof. Bach's parting column in the December 2009 issue of Spectra. For her last column Bach spoke in her voice and did not offer space to the Other. This time she decided to voice her own feelings of victimage as a straight white woman attempting to steer an unruly ship-o-diversity. She used the column to criticize the UNconvention for making the conference experience in 2008 uncomfortable to others, taking a jab at my colleagues (and I assume me, even though I didn't attend, because of the parody Shaun and I created). Worse, she made the divide-and-conquer move: the UNconvention people were discriminating against the physically disabled!

Now, "cowardly" is usually a term that denotes "lacking courage," but it also means "carried out against a person who is unable to retaliate." Waiting until one's last column to attack a constituency of an organization's membership---precisely because they could not respond, is certainly cowardly. Such a gesture is also the epitome of hypocrisy: "the practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which one's own behavior does not conform." To claim to be giving "voice" to those individuals whose views are marginalized while, nevertheless, marginalizing another constituency whose very purpose concerns public recognition seems hypocritical.

Finally, of course, we're talking about the president of a national, professional organization. I suppose, upon reflection, it is a presidential gesture to attempt to enact inclusion; I think former President George W. Bush assembled his cabinet this way, if I don't recall. But I think a professional organization's president requires a more nuanced approach.

What really bothered me about this column, however, was not its contradictory views. Anyone who believes issues of discrimination are solved by recourse to the logics of representation hasn't really thought about the issue; it's very vexed territory and very difficult to think through, so I give folks who do these kinds of things a lot of license---including myself. What's so bothersome is the fact that Bach waited a year, after the smoke had settled and after another convention had occurred (without major incident) to open a wound that was starting to heal. Why pick a fight on your way out? It's as if she was Larry taking two fingers to Curly's eye-sockets and saying, "ngyah ngyah!" The simple stupidity of such a gesture is enough to suggest someone is not in control of her rhetoric; this is not a good quality of a leader. It is great for community organizing, of course, but Bach is supposed to be the figurehead for my discipline, communication studies.

The day I learned of my tenure and promotion I decided to email Prof. Bach to express my deep disappointment with her column and, more importantly, the unprofessional gesture it represents. Why pick a fight when no one can respond? Why pick a fight when the issue has past? Why pick a fight when a previously divided convention was united once again? Her response was interesting, and since the email exchanges were tacitly coded as private, I'm not going to post everything she said. She noted that she did reject the column from the "unCONVENTION [sic] folks" because it did not provide commentary and was "largely comprised of links to websites." Further, " it was my opinion that y’all had your say in San Diego, and you were certainly entitled to hold your boycott." She concluded she would be happy to discuss things further, but "frankly don’t know what else to say at this point. It is my opinion, and I voiced it. I thank you for voicing your opinion."

Notably, the language of "entitlement" crops up here, as does the mistaken belief that "everyone is entitled to voice their opinion," even if it is misguided, wrong, evil, racist, and so forth. It would seem that if hiding behind the shield of this or that administrative position doesn't work, then free speech absolutism is the failsafe!

For me, the first reason to not go to NCA this fall is not Bach's column, but rather, what the column seems to be a symptom of: pettiness, an inability to be truly considerate, a tokenist approach to diversity, and complete rhetorical incompetence. I am glad the NCA leadership saw it fit to get rid of an executive director who was an even bigger problem. But I worry: first an executive director, and now a past president, have demonstrated a basic incompetence with public relations. Does my attending NCA continue to reward a leadership that has made a three year run at offending me and my colleagues?

There are exceptions: Art Bochner was an excellent president, despite the director. And I recognize some of you would respond that attending NCA is about seeing friends, regardless of what the national organization apparently says or stands-for. There are very important historical responses to the latter reasoning, of course.

Just thinking aloud here, and working-through. More reasons to attend, and not to attend, to come.