NEA 2026 Higher Ed Conference: Save the Date
March 6-8, 2026
Gila Resort Wild Pass
Phoenix, AZ
This year's conference theme is Resilience, Respect, and Power. The NEA Higher Education Conference is a critical gathering for activist leaders within the higher education community, bringing together faculty, staff, and graduate student members to strengthen union power that will advance NEA’s mission and vision. The conference serves as a platform to share ideas, learn from each other, and strengthen higher education unions.
Hotel Rate: $249 per night (single/double), plus taxes and fees
Reserve your room today! Hotel deadline is February 6, 2026.
Registration link is forthcoming
Plenary Speakers
Cheryl Holcomb-McCoy, Ph.D., is the president and CEO of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE), a role she assumed in January 2025. Prior to AACTE, she served for over eight years as dean of the School of Education at American University (AU), where she transformed the school into a stand-alone academic unit and expanded enrollment from 200 to over 1,500 students.
At AU, Dr. Holcomb-McCoy led key partnerships, including the AU/DCPS Teacher Pipeline Project, and co-led a multi-million-dollar JPMorgan Chase-funded initiative to launch the Advancing Early Education Collaborative (AEEC), a credentialing program supporting the early childhood workforce in the D.C. region.
She previously held leadership roles at Johns Hopkins University as Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs and Vice Dean of Academic Affairs in the School of Education, where she launched the Faculty Diversity Initiative and the School Counseling Fellows Program. Her earlier appointments include faculty positions at the University of Maryland, College Park, and Brooklyn College (CUNY).
Dr. Holcomb-McCoy began her career as a kindergarten teacher, later transitioning to roles as a school counselor and family therapist. She holds degrees from the University of Virginia (B.A., M.Ed.) and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (Ph.D.).
A 2023 Aspen Institute ASCEND Fellow and Fellow of the American Counseling Association, Dr. Holcomb-McCoy is a nationally recognized leader in educator preparation, with a scholarly and advocacy focus on opportunity for all and the full educator pipeline.
Dr. Tiera Tanksley is a Senior Researcher whose work examines the socioemotional, mental health and academic impacts of digital and artificially intelligent technologies on Black youth. Her work examines anti-Blackness as the “default setting” of schools and school-based technologies, including GenAI chatbots, facial recognition systems, weapons detection systems, and more. Her work simultaneously recognizes Black youth as digital activists and civic agitators, and examines the complex ways they subvert, resist, and rewrite algorithmically biased technologies to produce more-just and joyous digital experiences for Communities of Color across the diaspora. In 2020, Dr. Tanksley founded the Race, Abolition and Artificial Intelligence summer program - a critical science and technology program that prepares young people to have more critical, agentic and algorithmically-conscious relationships with digital technologies that exist within and beyond the educational setting. In 2025, she was awarded an AI in Education research grant from the Spencer Foundation.
At the annual NEA Higher Education Conference, NEA members from colleges and universities around the nation get together to share ideas and learn from each other.
The Higher Education Conference offers members the opportunity to submit proposals and present workshops; network with colleagues from across the country; attend sessions on professional development, organizing, racial justice, collective bargaining, and others; hear from NEA’s top officers, and participate in the National Council for Higher Education (NCHE) membership meeting.
