January-February 2000

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Clashes Over Benefits Rock Three Campuses

By Hans Johnson

Administrators’ resistance to domestic partnership policies continues to foster discontent at a pair of large eastern campuses. Recent actions—at Rutgers University and the University of Pittsburgh—run counter to a two-decade trend in higher education toward expanded coverage for the domestic partners of gay and lesbian professors in campus health insurance policies. Further conflict was averted, however, at a third campus: the University of New Hampshire.

At Rutgers, a rapprochement that prevailed through many years of negotiation on the issue is collapsing. Jim Anderson, a professor of communication, told the Daily Targum in September that he has spent "eighteen years trying to get this university to enact its antidiscrimination policy," which he argues must extend to partner benefits. In 1998 the university’s board of governors recommended that Rutgers administrators work out their differences with faculty unions over benefits to the same-sex partners of faculty members.

Led by university president Francis Lawrence, whose decade-long tenure has been dogged by the benefits dispute, Rutgers administrators have offered a plan that would grant partners 60 percent benefits. Anderson scoffs at the move, comparing it to the calculus of the U.S. Constitution that slaves be counted as three-fifths of a person for purposes of a census. Rutgers AAUP chapter president Patricia Reeling supports Anderson, saying that the chapter has not signed off on the 60 percent plan because "it doesn’t resolve the issues of the people who were involved in the beginning" of the push for equal benefits.

At the University of Pittsburgh, a brouhaha over benefits has already led to litigation. In comments made during a deposition, J. Wray Connolly, chair of Pittsburgh’s board of trustees, told attorneys for gay and lesbian university employees, "My problem is the gay and lesbian lifestyle is a different lifestyle. . . . I would be concerned unless you could assure me . . . that the caregiver [faculty] was not attempting to proselytize the children."

The comments drew ridicule in the press and rebuke from current and former Pitt faculty members. Resolutions from the university senate and several protests, including a hunger strike by seventeen students, have sought to focus public attention on the disparity in benefits. "I have been impressed with the strong commitment of students to equality, fairness, and social justice," says Audrey Murrell, a professor of business administration and psychology at Pitt. The students’ efforts are all the more noteworthy, she adds, because only faculty and staff stand to receive the benefits should the plaintiffs prevail in court.

In November Pennsylvania legislators voted to allow public campuses in the state to deny benefits to same-sex partners of their faculty and other employees. Approval of such a law is not, however, expected to short-circuit the Pitt lawsuit.

At the University of New Hampshire, the hopes of faculty and staff to secure health benefits for same-sex partners seemed dashed after a committee of university trustees deciding on the matter in October deadlocked 3 to 3. The vote effectively blocked extension of the benefits. Dismay among professors at the institution, whose AAUP chapter serves as the collective bargaining agent for full-time faculty, proved short-lived, however. In early December, a larger assembly of trustees brushed aside the committee outcome and voted 21 to 1 to approve benefits for same-sex domestic partners of faculty and staff. In testimony in favor of the partners measure, former governor and current trustee Walter Peterson called the vote a needed remedy to a long-standing inequity.

AAUP representatives cheered the December vote, which will allow benefits to take effect for public university staff and most state faculty on February 1. "The AAUP chapter here has supported the proposal for domestic partnership benefits for two and a half years," says Chris Balling, president of the UNH chapter. "We always said it was the right thing to do and the sensible thing to do."

Estimated costs for implementing the proposal at UNH come to about $25,000, constituting a minuscule fraction of the current health plan’s price tag. Reports from more than one hundred campuses nationwide that offer such benefits indicate that extending coverage to same-sex partners of employees usually costs an additional 1 percent of the total cost of the overall benefits package.Nota Bene: