NCTE and the Doublespeak Award Professionalized Demagoguery

Building the Intelleftual Academic Atmosphere, One Award at a Time

My discipline’s (Rhetoric, Composition, and Writing Studies) scholarly literature began in the 1930s yet emerged in the 1970s with a leftist, activist, teaching practice that was once laughed off. No one is laughing today.

Especially in light of America’s elite universities failing to condemn antisemitic calls for genocide on their campuses as hate speech and harassment (by students or Presidents Magill, Gay, and Kornbluth) since 10/7. Thousands of scholars, myself included, at Heterodox Academy aren’t laughing. Neither were these public figures who published the Harper’s Letter on Justice and Open Debate in July 2020. Consider The FIRE which defends professors’ free speech on campuses. At least, I haven’t been laughing for the past decade as my discipline normalizes scapegoating my race, sexual orientation, and gender (white heterosexual male) for society’s disparities. That’s across 30 graduate courses since 2012 and full-time occupation at a college since 2014.

If you’ve read any of my previous Intelleftual posts, you know I’m investigating the origins of my discipline’s ideological leftward dominance. A decades-long academic dominance so thorough and complete that any university/college student today naturally imbibes basic leftist tenets as though they are objective, given truths, and not limited partisan perspectives with serious limitations and even harmful flaws.

Tenets you might be familiar with today are the oppressor/oppressed binary, that white people are guilty, that the US is systemically and irreversibly Racist, the personal is political, that the patriarchy rules All independently of individual people’s actions because all that Men want is Power in Mordorian fashion, etc.

In 2 ways, the English education organization, NCTE, played a fundamental role in linking leftist ideological tenets in academia with leftist ideology in politics. Before I explain my call to action, here is my call to NCTE:

Resolved: the Doublespeak Award incentivized the normalization of not just a political viewpoint at the expense of another but the professionalization of demagoguery in English scholarship and related disciplines.

Rationale

For nearly 50 years, the Doublespeak Award promoted and cultivated a professional demagogic discourse about language misuse in American society. Across 20 years and 4 Democratic presidential administrations, the world’s most powerful political figures’ misuse of language, rhetoric, and discourse went unexamined and unawarded. NCTE should account for its longstanding demagogic posture and practice of Othering media and political figures within its pages...and its professors’ and students’ minds.

Academic journals compose a discipline and its discourse by defining what questions can be asked and what objects can be studied. As much as journals professionalize a social and intellectual space to research in a discipline in this way, NCTE’s Doublespeak award likewise signaled to its academic audience that it is professionally permissible to attack certain viewpoints while its own preferred bias remained sacrosanct, unassailable. Such bias obstructs honest reflective practice, scholarly discourse, and democratic deliberation. Should NCTE have predominately heaped ironic Doublespeak praise on only liberal or progressive figures, I would likewise question its ability to hold the most powerful to account in any year and era. We would also conclude it had acted in demonstrable partisan fashion.

Demagoguing the very mission of examining language and misuse of it by powerful people was itself a misuse of language and professional position and power. The only glaring irony is that NCTE demonstrates it neither considered the ethical grounds on which its award proceeded nor the rhetorical consequences of such partisan behavior on the discipline’s scholarship, professors, and K-12 teachers, not to mention its writing students.

The 1990s Inflection Point

As I began my investigation, I mistakenly thought the spiral into my discipline’s orthodoxy began in the 1990s. In an article presciently titled Diversity, Ideology, and Teaching Writing (1991), English scholar, Maxine Hairston, controversially criticizes what she labeled a disturbing trend where writing professors and instructors began teaching their personal political views as writing course content. She says they “claimed writing courses as their political territory” (183) (but as I show, they first claimed academic journals as their political territory). For this reason and many more, Hairston wished writing programs would divest from English departments.

While postmodernist views like Derrida’s deconstruction of language permeated English departments and destabilized my discipline’s respect for national pride or ‘traditional’ family and religious values, social justice and Marxism slowly supplanted those views with oppressor/oppressed tenets in the form of critical pedagogy, critical race theory, queer theory, antiracism, and antinormativity. Nuclear family and religious values (whatever you think of them) became capitalist constructs and cultural sites worthy of dismantling (as BLM promoted on its website yet removed as of September 2021).

As of 2012, Hairston’s article had provoked more responses than any article in the history of the journal, dating back to 1953 when it was established. The journal permitted, via their call and response practice, several instructors to respond to her criticisms of their theories and activist practices in the next volume. Warranted to some extent, those replies were not matched by anyone writing in support of her views. Later, one article was written to support her views. Quite lopsided.

In Hairston’s article and its immediate replies I find the roots of the current DEI trainings, offices, and hiring requirements, and even cancel culture. A disciplinary inflection point if not the beginning, per se. And, intriguingly, none of my Cal State or Virginia Tech professors brought up Hairston or the complexity and opposition in the discipline’s emerging one-sided ideological history when we studied the discipline’s formation.

And as my professors are fond of saying about how to identify ideology in historical narratives, look for who is left out, omitted, or erased…

Earlier Beginnings and NCTE

And, it turns out, the leftist lurch Hairston began to address in the 90s arguably began in the 70s and 80s with the establishment of the Doublespeak Quarterly Journal (DQJ) and the Doublespeak Award in 1974 by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). This award left out, omitted, and erased liberals, progressives, and Democrats from criticism. And we will see the effects…

First, for those who don’t know, NCTE began in 1911, at one point claimed 60,00 members (it’s hard to find reliable numbers), and is responsible today for publishing 12 journals, including the longest-published RCWS journals (Research in the Teaching of English, College English) and today’s flagship journal (College Composition and Communication) that form the RCWS discipline as distinct from, say, English literature, linguistics, or creative writing. From its website:

NCTE is the leading partner in giving educators a voice as the educational landscape changes and the needs of teachers from preK through college evolve.

Also, it encourages membership in terms of professional development:

When you join NCTE, you’ll be joining the best minds in English, language arts, and writing studies.

For nearly 50 years, NCTE attempted to empower English educators in part by calling out political leaders who used duplicitous or deceptively euphemistic language to obscure or confuse otherwise troubling policies or corruption. Check the powerful - a laudable aspiration. Tried to meet that bar by passing two 1971 resolutions condemning dishonest and inhumane language, creating the Committee on Doublespeak in 1972 to combat advertisers and politicians who manipulate language (in Beyond Nineteen Eighty-Four: Doublespeak in a Post-Orwellian Age, Lutz, 1989), and founding the DQJ journal and the Doublespeak Award in 1974. Yet, within a few years, the award overwhelmingly targeted institutional or political figures from one side of the political aisle: conservatives, Republicans, corporate executives, and military figures.

As you can see below, over its nearly 50 year history, liberals and progressives were overwhelmingly omitted from criticism, claiming only 3.33 awards out of 47 while conservatives claimed 24; yes, an 8-to-1 ratio. Bill Clinton, journalist Joe Klein, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel, and the New York State Regents make up the 3.33 Liberal awards. You might dispute Klein’s and NY State Regents’s liberal leanings, and if you do, then the ratio increases to 24:2, leaving Clinton’s third of an award in 1993 the sole liberal presidential award recipient. And conservative politicians and media figures accounted for an astounding 52% of all award recipients to liberals’ 8.6%. (or 4.3%) While I think any politician’s speech relative to their policies undoubtedly deserves to be criticized, the utterly imbalanced criticism is telling.

Here is a chart breaking down the award recipient distribution by political ideology:

Recipient Breakdown

As you will see here, conspicuously absent are: Presidents Obama, Carter, and Biden.

Democrat/Republican President Recipients

Clinton’s award arguably counts as a third (as argued above) because he shared it with conservative Trent Lott and Republican U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich. No one was awarded in 2021 when NCTE discontinued the award. In 2022, the NCTE renamed the award from The Doublespeak Award to The Year in Doublespeak to publish an annual list of several examples of doublespeak, which has yet to be published.

The change comes on the heels of the last award, given in 2020, of a single phrase - the ‘China virus’ - that could be used by anyone. NCTE stated that the award was being “reimagined in order to align it with our current mission, vision, values, and policies”. For whatever reasons, they sought to change this from an individual award to a term-based collective word award, and I think the change highlights a move to align more with their postmodernist deconstructionist origins, which are to “highlight the movement of language itself, rather than [an] individual [speaker]” (Crowley, 24). The full 46-year recipient list and ideology breakdown are in Appendices 1 and 2 below.

The rhetorical effect is to imply that conservatives or Republicans regularly engage in doublespeak whereas liberals, progressives, and Democrats do not. Moreover, an inattentive millennial or Gen Z reader seeing today’s corporations advertise DEI allegiance would have no clue that from the 1970s until about 2020, liberals and progressives preached that corporations were suspect or oppressive via their profit motive and crossover with political appointments and lobbying efforts like the NRA and Exxon Corporation (the truth is the Democratic party engaged in decades of corporate funding and crony capitalism to compete with its Republican political rivals’ similar efforts). In any event, such crossover is perhaps best illustrated via Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent (1998). Accounting for this bias would tip the corporate award recipients somewhat into the conservative category given how those entities (State Dept., Dept. of Defense, etc.) were recipients during Republican presidencies (except for 1993 in Clinton’s first year).

Now I see that, in part, the Doublespeak Award and DQJ publication reflected a dedicated partisanship and leftist ideology that grew independently of the 1991 Hairston article dustup. Yet, how could the award not contribute to what was considered permissible perspectives and viewpoints in the discipline’s journals?

I believe Hairston was likely aware of these sentiments in part because of concurrent characterizations (from 87-89) like self-dubbed critical intellectual Richard Ohmann made when stating (in Lutz 1989) that the Reagan Administration was “a particular group of maniacs” and “the lunatic Right” (97) or Edward White of CSU cynically demeaning the simplistic rhetoric of cars with religious bumper stickers as “heaven-bound chariots” exploited by “public hypocrisies of TV preachers” (61) or Charles Weingartner of USF stating “the stories are endless about how dumb the ordinary American is” (51), culminating in this dismissive gem that

[w]hat adult Americans have inside their heads (as revealed by their theology, their philosophy, their political views, their beliefs about people different from themselves, and their understanding of how their own bodies function) is indistinguishable from the contents of the heads of medieval peasants.

Utter needless disdain to discuss what he considered then-current media deception, dubbing it ‘American Dumb’. His rather accurate point is sullied by demagoguery. Any surprise that Hilary Clinton’s 2016 ‘deplorables’ comment was ever uttered with ‘sophisticated’ insults like these permeating NCTE’s pages? I heard such dismissiveness on the daily in courses from professors and grad students at CSUSB and Virginia Tech from 2018-2022. It has become such an unthinking rhetorical trope in English scholarship to signal your ideological/political correct-think bona fides by Othering or demagoguing your political opponent that UN-Reno linguistics professor Valerie Fridland refers to Margaret Thatcher, Donald Trump, Tony Blair, and Sarah Palin as examples of deceptive and inauthentic speech changes (Like Literally, Dude? 2023). Really? 40 years of politics and no liberals or progressives changed their speech habits to woo a crowd? Ah, but when Obama does it, it’s virtuous and respectable code-switching to forge a diverse coalition. Or he’s secretly code-meshing (Young, 2009) to change the linguistic game. His intention is pure. Intelleftuals.

Today, in our English journals and first-year writing scholarship, students unquestioningly parrot this demeaning take on American culture and religion, specifically Christianity, except via sophisticated scholarly terms and theories, so one could ironically say of such students that they ‘know not what they do’. Intelleftuals.

Together, the Hairston controversy and Doublespeak Award contribute to the leftist academic-political atmosphere students inherit. Together, they shrunk the intellectual space by more narrowly defining acceptable political speech and labeling a viewpoint as linguistically and rhetorically problematic. Does any of this resonate with online speech and cancelations today? The Doublespeak Award and the Hairston article responses are only two ongoing and past instances of a broader demagogic discourse that I will analyze in upcoming articles.

And, in upcoming posts, I’ll explain how my discipline’s journals negatively analyze Republican presidential rhetoric (Bush and Trump) yet positively analyze Democratic presidential rhetoric (Clinton and Obama) or ignore it altogether, further codifying the leftist academic-political worldview as normal in the discipline and Othering (demagoguing) a general conservative worldview.

If anything: what happens on campus, DOES NOT stay on campus.

Rhetorical Residue: Normalizing a Leftist (Intelleftual) Worldview

Now, what are the epistemic and cultural effects of this approach, of unquestioningly accepting a demagoguing approach? Such ideologically infused scholarship overtly and subtly shapes the academic discourse and broader cultural discourse as ardent believers shout it proudly while many silently assent, subjugated to its imposition in the market.

Now, RCWS is only one discipline, so my Project Luminas research will ultimately remain incomplete relative to its broader hold in academia. Yet tracking the rise of Intelleftualism within one discipline like RCWS provides a model for detecting it in other Humanities and even STEM disciplines. Tracking can help show us what quality of knowledge university students encounter today…and how to engage with it. Here is what I call the epistemic cycle categorizing how these initially fringe academic ideologies became acceptable, even mainstream, beliefs in America:

1. Theories (1950s-1960s)

2. Established Disciplinary Viewpoints (1970s-1980s)

3. Objective Givens/Truths (1990s-2000s)

4. Myopic Conclusions/Hollow Performance (2010s-today)

We live and work in the tail end of stage 3 and fully in stage 4 and are reaping the effects personally (DEI trainings, professor firings), politically (Justice Democrats), economically (ESG), and culturally (transgender surgery, distrust in higher ed, K-12). University students rarely approach social justice ideology in stages 1 and 2 today, and because of that, they more rarely learn of the ironically white male European origins of postmodern theory that undergirds so much of today’s woke Intelleftual worldview.

If only they knew…

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Appendix 1

Appendix 2