Domestic Partner Catch-22

FROM THE ARCHIVES (Daily Nebraskan columns)

Domestic Partner Catch-22

Jeremy Patrick (jhaeman@hotmail.com)

The Daily Nebraskan April 02, 2001
"Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism."
--Mary McCarthy, The New Yorker magazine

We are angry, we are frustrated, and we are tired. But we are not going to be quiet until NU stops spouting "equality" and starts delivering it. The history of domestic partner benefits at NU is like something out of Joseph Heller's "Catch-22."
The University-Wide Fringe Benefits Committee says it is not itself "a decision-making body" and tables the issue of domestic partner benefits. Higher-level administrators say that the issue must be decided by the regents or by the Legislature. The Board of Regents avoids addressing the issue because the benefits committee is supposed to decide it but asserts that the "public policy" of Nebraska is against it. Legislators, who decide the state's "public policy," point to the Nebraska Constitution, which leaves responsibility for deciding issues like faculty benefits to the Board of Regents and the committees it creates.
Everybody has excuses; nobody has answers. And the result is that gifted faculty members who have spent their entire careers at NU are denied the benefits any heterosexual teacher acquires: funeral leave, sick leave, family medical leave of absence and the institution's crisis leave sharing policy. Additionally, faculty members with same-sex partners are denied equal access to NU's health plan, forcing them to spend thousands of dollars more on private health insurance. The net effect is that heterosexual teachers and staff earn several thousand dollars more than gay or bisexual faculty members.
Although UNL's Academic Senate and ASUN have repeatedly called for domestic partner benefits and two-thirds of NU's "peer institutions" offer them, no visible progress has been made.
It all began in 1992, when the Annual Report of UNL's Homophobia Awareness Committee called for domestic partner benefits. After a meeting, then-Chancellor Graham Spanier stated that he "supported a revision in the proposed family leave policy to accommodate gay and lesbian couples." No real action was taken until the University-Wide Fringe Benefits Committee considered the issue in 1996. The committee permanently tabled the idea on a 6-3 vote and "agreed not to reconsider the matter until legal, financial and other matters are resolved." (Omaha World-Herald, 8/16/96)
Unclear as to what the "legal, financial and other" questions were, the Committee on Lesbian and Gay Concerns offered to provide more information. John Russell, an administrator at NU, wrote back and stated that the committee didn't need any additional information and wouldn't reconsider the question until "such issues ... are resolved by the appropriate jurisdictions (judicial, legislative, etc.)."
And thus, the dissembling begins.
One should ask exactly which "judicial" and "legislative" issues the committee was waiting on. The benefits committee is not made up of lawyers, it did not ask for legal advice, and if it really did do its research, it would have seen that dozens of "Tier 1" universities implemented domestic partner benefits without difficulty. The benefits committee could have addressed the issue and simply chose not to. Their decision making is controlled by two factors. First, is offering benefits in the best interest of the faculty and staff? Second, is it economically feasible? Of course, the answers to both questions are a resounding yes. By permanently tabling the issue, the committee was cowardly able to avoid justifying its actions by placing the burden on vague "legislative" and "judicial" shoulders.
Fast-forward to 2000. The issue is still tabled in the benefits committee. In August of 2000, UNL's student health plan goes into effect, which allows students to claim their domestic partners for health insurance. Now, not only are GLBT faculty members denied benefits that straight faculty members receive, they are denied health benefits that both undergraduate and graduate students receive.
Questioned about the effect of Initiative 416 in the Daily Nebraskan, University General Counsel Dick Wood states that it would not prevent the university's offering domestic-partner benefits. This makes sense, especially considering that the amendment is of dubious constitutionality and that resolving the legal dispute is likely to take years.
The most recent blow came on February 5, when NU President Dennis Smith sent an e-mail to all faculty and staff about the new tuition credit for faculty family members. He began the letter by saying, "I want to share a development with you that, if approved, will positively impact all full-time university employees." (emphasis added) It quickly became apparent that the tuition-credit plan would only benefit some faculty members: GLBT teachers and staff would suffer an additional inequality in benefits.
All of this, then, comes in the face of NU's written policy that it makes "all decisions regarding recruitment, hiring, promotion, and all other terms and conditions of employment without discrimination on the basis of ... individual characteristics other than qualifications for employment, quality of performance ... and conduct related to employment." (emphasis added)
Further on in the policy, NU vows to administer all of its "employment programs" without discrimination on the basis of "sexual orientation" and "marital status."
The university simply cannot have it both ways. Retaining such a policy under current conditions is dishonest and deceptive to both current employees and those considering employment here. The university must either offer equal benefits to all persons based solely on merit or stop claiming that it doesn't discriminate.
In this case, sincere malice would be preferable to blatant hypocrisy.