Ethics - Widener University

Letter from the President
Welcome to the 38th Annual Meeting of the College English Association!
I’ve been saying for years now that CEA is the best kept secret in academic conferences. Smart,
collegial, even daring.
I started coming to CEA for no better reason than John Shawcross told me to go (but who
needs a better reason?). John might have been President at the time, but he was (as always)
right. I think I was hooked from the very first conference. Why?
CEA’s the best place I know of to try out ideas and to get great feedback, all in a friendly,
collegial atmosphere.
Perhaps it’s because the typical CEA member has to know how to teach a range of topics.
Most of our members—even those, like me, now at research institutions—have a long history
teaching composition, world literature, upper-level courses for majors, and anything else
our departments need at any given moment. We develop broad interests, and we see the
connections across them. The intellectual challenges of these kinds of appointments are often
under-valued in an academy which privileges a narrow, deep, but disconnected knowledge over
a broad, connected one. As a result, one rarely hears the research-school mantra—“not my
field”—at CEA because for the most part CEA members all know something about everything
(sometimes a lot about everything). And CEA members realize that what we don’t know, we
might still have occasion to learn.
The benefit this offers other presenters at CEA is significant, for surprisingly often, you are
presenting to scholars who know the text you are discussing. And when I say presentations
get friendly responses, that’s not to say that CEA members don’t ask rigorous questions. In
fact, I get better , smarter, harder questions at CEA than at the more specialized conferences I
attend. I think the difference is one of intent: I’ve never gotten a question at CEA that wasn’t
intended to help me develop my work in profitable directions. And though occasionally we do
get someone (trained at those “other” conferences) who thinks the purpose of questions is to
show how much the questioner knows, pretty soon that poor soul figures out that’s not what
we’re about.
Perhaps this is also the reason that CEA values teaching and pedagogical discussions so
much. We place the value of our labor in our classrooms and in our students. Even when
not specifically about teaching, CEA’s scholarly papers are more applicable to my life in the
classroom—alerting me to brand-new teaching tools (and how to use them), to texts I might
want to read (or teach). The presentations themselves are always intellectually inventive or
pedagogically creative like the presentation I’ve never forgotten on commonalities between
Chaucer and a important Aztec poet.
As I’ve gotten older, CEA has also become a meeting-place for me and colleagues who have
moved to other institutions or who are in other fields. We have common ground at CEA—each
of us able to find plenty to hear about in our own fields, while still being at the same conference.
And I’ve also developed CEA-friends, those colleagues I see only once a year, but whose
friendliness, kindness and wit make each year a valued and memorable event.
If, dear reader, you have been to a CEA conference before, then you know what I’m talking
about. But if you are new to our organization, you are in for a treat, and I hope you find your
expereinces here as welcoming, friendly, and challenging as I have always found mine.
I have been honored to serve CEA this year as President.
Ann R. Hawkins,
CEA President, 2005-2006, Spring 2007
P. S.: Please come by the registration table and say hi. If there’s anything you need, let us know.