NEA Higher Educator of the Year addresses delegates to the 105th Representative Assembly

Thank you, NEA. I want to give a heartfelt thank you to the Tennessee Education Association for their incredible support.

I didn't get into this work for the money. Anyone who's been in this room longer than five minutes already knows that. I got into it because I believed it mattered enough to sacrifice for.

And then I spent almost thirty years proving it - thirteen in K-12, sixteen in higher education, and a stretch in the middle where I was doing all of it at once.

And that belief is what brought me here today. It only works - all of it - when faculty have the freedom to teach the truth, have a seat at the table where decisions get made, and compensation that says this profession is worth something.

That's what I've been fighting for. That's what this association fights for every single day.

I am here because of the students who challenge me, the colleagues who have mentored me, and the association that gives us a collective voice. I don't take this honor as a compliment. I take it as a challenge. To keep fighting. To bring more people into this work. And to make sure the next thirty years look better than the last.

Today, I want to talk about how we elevate higher education using seven powerful verbs championed by our NEA President, Becky Pringle.

First: we educate. That's the foundation of everything we do. But part of that mission - a part we sometimes skip - is educating the public about what we actually do and what we're actually up against.

Faculty get asked to pour everything into students' futures while having no certainty about their own. That's not a complaint. Faculty working conditions are student learning conditions. That's not a talking point. That's a fact the public needs to hear. And we need to say it like we mean it.

Which means we have to communicate. Now, I coach sixth grade boys basketball. And I will tell you - there is no situation in my professional life that has better prepared me for difficult communication than trying to run a half-court offense with twelve-year-olds who think they're Steph Curry.

At some point every season, I am standing on the sideline watching one of my guys dribble directly into triple coverage. And I have to make a choice - do I stay quiet, or do I say something? I say something. Every time. Because silence doesn't teach anybody.

On our campuses, we have to make the same choice. Our value, our research, our expertise - none of it speaks for itself. We have to speak for it. Clearly, consistently, and without apologizing for taking up space.

And in right-to-work environments - designed specifically to make organizing feel pointless - communication is how we build. Organizing takes patience. Organizing takes the ability to manage absolute chaos. I have tried several organizing tactics: one-on-ones, webinars, town halls. You know what actually works? Same thing that works with middle schoolers. Snacks.

When you organize, you look a colleague in the eye and say: we are stronger together, and there is a place for you here. That's the whole pitch. And it works. You can't truly fight for students without also fighting for the people who teach them.

Once we're organized, we mobilize. Mobilizing means finding the room where the decisions are being made and pulling up a chair - even when there isn't one set out for you. Mobilizing is taking that energy into our faculty senates, into shared governance, into every room where decisions about our profession are being made without us.

We legislate and we elect. That means knowing your legislators by name, showing up in their offices whether they want to see you or not, and supporting candidates who understand what public education is worth.

It means sitting in a waiting room to get seven minutes with a twenty-three-year-old staffer who has never graded a paper, and making those seven minutes count anyway. Educational policy should not be written by people who have never set foot in a classroom. And yet here we are - watching people who couldn't survive a Tuesday in November with thirty freshmen make decisions about what we teach, how we teach it, and whether we get to keep our jobs.

And when they come for our contracts, when academic freedom gets attacked, when tenure gets treated like a suggestion - welitigate.

We bring the facts. And then we bring the lawyers. Look at the NEA's injunction against the Higher Education Dear Colleague Letter - that decision protected real people, faculty who would have lost protections they'd spent careers earning.

That's what it looks like when we stop asking politely and start drawing lines in the sand.

I want to tell you about one of my Special Olympics athletes. His name is Sam. I coached him at the 2022 USA Special Olympics Games.

Sam was in a track event. And right after the starting gun, another runner in his heat went down, hard. Just fell. And the field took off.

Sam stopped.

He turned around, went back, and helped that athlete up.

And then - instead of sprinting for the finish line - he linked arms with him, and they walked across the finish line together.

Sam didn't want the medal more than he wanted that person to finish the race.

That is solidarity.

I think about Sam a lot when the work gets hard. Because it does get hard. And it's tempting, when it's hard, to just run your own race. Remember, an individual is a spark; a collective is a wildfire. Alone, they can ignore us. Together, they have to face us.

Be someone's Sam.

That's our mission. Stand up for each other.

Protect academic freedom. Make sure every educator has what they need to do the work. And then go find the person who doesn't know that there's a place for them and bring them in.

To my family, the NEA, the National Council for Higher Education, the Tennessee Education Association, the NEA Foundation, and every delegate in this room: thank you for this tremendous honor. Now let's go back to our campuses and do what we do. Let's demand what's fair. Let's bring out the brilliance in every person we serve.

Thank you.