Earlier this week, The Cavalier Daily ran an article titled "Gay at U.Va.: Part 1" that highlighted the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer faculty and staff at the University. The piece pointed out that the University's employee benefits package does not allow LGBTQ faculty and staff to claim their partners or their partners' children as individuals eligible for coverage. In addition, it noted the University's failure to compile detailed data about LGBTQ employees through its faculty and staff survey.
Medical Center employee Edward Strickler reiterated these issues in a guest column in yesterday's paper, and questioned whether the University had decided that cost and convenience are "rational bases" for discrimination. In response to the airing of these concerns, the University should seek to affirm its support for the LGBTQ communities by liberalizing its benefits package and revising its faculty and staff survey so that the experiences of LGBTQ employees can be measured more accurately.
The University can follow the model of the University of Michigan, a peer institution and President Teresa Sullivan's former home, when restructuring its benefits package to offer LGBTQ employees equal treatment. Although Michigan state law prohibits the recognition of same-sex marriages and unions, the University of Michigan added a category of individuals known as "other qualified adults" who are eligible for coverage through employee benefits packages if they meet certain criteria. Chief among these are a co-residency requirement and a stipulation that eligible individuals cannot be tenants or close biological relatives of the university employee.
If the University established identical standards, the only potential obstacle to LGBTQ employees' partners and those partners' children receiving benefits would be if the General Assembly passed a law specifically prohibiting such an arrangement. As long as Democrats control the State Senate, however, it seems unlikely that such a law would make it to the governor's desk.
Moreover, the University should draft a new faculty and staff survey that asks respondents to list their sexual orientation in addition to their gender and race. This would allow the University to track the number of LGBTQ faculty members it has, so that it knows whether hiring parity is being achieved. More importantly, it would make it possible to classify the qualitative responses of employees according to their sexual orientation. The University then could determine the overall satisfaction of LGBTQ employees and whether they feel their needs are being met.
Although asking employees to identify their sexual orientation initially may be controversial because of concerns that the information could be misused, it is a necessary change to ensure that policies are tailored to accommodate the LGBTQ communities. To alleviate employees' fears, the University should be transparent about exactly who has access to the collected information and it should work to keep collected information confidential by destroying caches of data that become outdated.
Undertaking these changes is the University's fundamental responsibility given its commitment to the fair treatment of employees. There also is a prudential reason for doing so. If the University lags behind its peers in terms of the compensation and attention paid to LGBTQ employees, then it may have a harder time competing for talented faculty and staff members. At a time when some states are legalizing same-sex marriages and unions, the University cannot hope to attract LGBTQ hires if it does not upgrade its offerings to members of those communities. Improving its benefits package would be a logical first step, and it could devise further policy changes based on feedback received from LGBTQ employees through an altered survey.
Of course, the University may incur additional costs if it seeks to expand its benefits package and rewrite its faculty and staff survey. As Strickler argued yesterday, however, the price tag of equality is not a "rational basis" for discrimination. Despite its budget constraints, the University recently took the positive step of raising the minimum wage paid to its employees, and it should devote the same attention to the plight of its LGBTQ faculty and staff. With the Board of Visitors convening next month, the University has a perfect chance to address this vital constituency's long-standing concerns.
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