Rationale for reconstituting CASLL
Thanks, Jane and Doug, for raising the questions you have—I’m sure other people are also wondering about the reasoning behind this membership drive.
CASLL’s bank balance is about $6300 at the moment. This might indeed seem to make collecting money from members at the moment unnecessary; however, the question is, who are the members? And even more importantly, who has the authority to do something—or anything--with that money? (I certainly don’t think I do.) Our thinking was that in order for us to do anything with the Inkshed bank account we first need to re-start the organization under its existing constitution. For that reason Roger proposed that we charge the established membership fee, as stated in the last issue of the Inkshed newsletter (see the “About Inkshed” section on page 2 of http://www.stu.ca/inkshed/nletta08/inkshed25.1.pdf). Once the organization is re-established, the members could then vote on a proposal to reduce the fees (among other things). The benefit for membership this year is that it is essentially also the conference fee, if we decide to have another one-day or even longer conference in May. Roger has stated his willingness to organize another meeting this year after CASDW if there is interest.
It should be noted, though, that this doesn’t necessarily mean Inkshed will be subsumed under CASDW, or that future Inkshed meetings will always be appended to the CASDW conference. The meetings we had in Ottawa and then in Montreal re Inkshed suggested that there is a widely felt sense that Inkshed is not CASDW and should not be like CASDW. So it may, indeed, continue as a separate but affiliated group. That, and the form of future meetings, will be up to the membership to decide. But first we have to have a membership, and the only way to do that is for everyone who wants to be a member to pay the fees listed by the organization. To have the disposition of CASLL’s funds and the future of the association itself decided any other way would be very problematic, it seems to us.
Brock
*********************************************************
W. Brock MacDonald
Director, Academic Writing Centre
Woodsworth College, University of Toronto
119 St. George Street
Toronto, ON M5S-1A9
Phone: (416) 978-0246
Fax: (416) 978-6111
*********************************************************
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
To leave the list, send a SIGNOFF CASLL-L command to
[log in to unmask] or, if you experience difficulties,
write to Russ Hunt at [log in to unmask]
To view or search the list archives, go to
https://listserv.utoronto.ca/cgi-bin/wa?A0=CASLL-L
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
