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NYU Settles Tenure Denial Case
In May, New York University settled a claim with a former education professor, Joel Westheimer, who was denied tenure last year after testifying in faor of graduate student employees’ right to unionize.
At a 1999 hearing held by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), Westheimer testified that teaching assistantships in his department were more like jobs than supervised learning experiences, and that teaching assistants therefore should be eligible to unionize if they so chose. NYU’s administration was strongly opposed to the graduate students’ ultimately successful union bid, and Westheimer was the only untenured professor to testify in support of the students. The teaching assistants signed their first contract with the university in February 2002.
Westheimer’s tenure denial was protested by, among others, the university’s AAUP chapter and four past presidents of the American Educational Research Association, a prominent scholarly association in Westheimer’s field.
Attorneys for Westheimer filed a charge with the NLRB in 2001, claiming that he was denied tenure in retaliation for his testimony. University administrators maintain that the reasons for the denial were unrelated to his opposition to administrators’ policies. After investigating the charge, a regional office of the NLRB issued a formal complaint against NYU, and the case was slated to be heard by an administrative law judge when the settlement was reached.
According to the terms of the settlement, Westheimer received $15,000, and the record of his tenure denial was expunged. Westheimer, who now has a position at the University of Ottawa, agreed to withdraw his NLRB claim and his tenure application.
The NYU administration has been on the AAUP’s censure list since 1996 because of its violation of academic freedom and tenure in a different case.
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