National Education Association
American Federation of Teachers

[Editor’s note: The National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers are the highly politicized parent organizations (e.g. here and  here) of the United Faculty of Florida (UFF). The UFF is the same faculty union FAU Professor James Tracy belonged to at the time of his termination by FAU administrators on January 6, 2016. Tracy was of UFF-FAU chapter president in 2009-2011 when the FAU administration summarily fired five professors in the university’s College of Engineering (here and here). Perhaps coincidentally, the following essay was directly referenced in Lenny and Veronique Pozner’s inflammatory December 10 article published by the South Florida Sun-Sentinel that appears to have prompted Tracy’s firing. Today few US faculty actually challenge the status quo, and thus one could make the argument (which NEA/AFT counter below) that tenure may have merely become the guarantee of a handsome sinecure that guarantees the institutional continuity of politically innocuous schools of thought and overall ideological conformity .-JFT]

You may well have heard about attacks on tenure and college faculty. After all, people write books and get quoted in the press grinding this ax. The argument is not hard to believe, either; we’ve all seen people in authority, private and public, who care more about protecting themselves than serving their customers. You may have memories of a teacher who didn’t seem to keep up with his or her subject or care very much about his or her students.

But there’s a big problem with the negative polemics about tenure: They are not true. This NEA-AFT Online brochure deals with some of the myths about tenure and responds with the facts. It tells the truth about tenure — a human institution with flaws — but a practice we can be proud of and need to maintain.

Continue reading “The Truth About Tenure in Higher Education” →