Earning a distinction that school officials are unlikely to include in any upcoming promotional materials, the University of Wisconsin is now the only school in the Big Ten to not offer domestic-partner health insurance to employees.
Pennsylvania State University, which was previously the only other school in the 11-university conference to not offer the benefits, started offering the insurance in early January.
With UW the only holdout among its Midwest neighbors, school officials fear the university’s ability to recruit and retain qualified staff and faculty will and already does suffer.
“This has become a fairly common benefit across the country, and it begins to make us stick out like a sore thumb,” Darrell Bazzell, UW vice chancellor for administration, said. “There have been a number of situations where we had a strong candidate for a job who dropped out when he or she found out [about the lack of benefits].”
The lack of benefits stems from a Wisconsin state law barring state employees from receiving health insurance for domestic partners.
Along with a proposed constitutional amendment that would define marriage as the union of one man and one woman in the state, some say Wisconsin is not the welcoming environment to same-sex couples it once was.
Eric Trekell, director of the LGBT Campus Center, said he has fielded calls from prospective staff wondering whether UW offers health-care benefits to the partners of employees.
“I always have to tell them that we don’t have those benefits,” Trekell said. “My gut feeling is that certainly there are people that have interest here but are open to other elite universities because we don’t have [those benefits].”
The UW System has lobbied the state for several years to allow for domestic-partner health insurance in its benefits package. Little progress has been made thus far, however, with Gov. Jim Doyle supporting the plan, but the Republican-controlled legislature considerably less enthusiastic.
“The will is there from the university, the public and the governor,” Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Madison, said. “The problem is that the legislature isn’t quite as smart on this issue as those groups are. The legislature will never allow that in its current makeup, and that will harm the university ultimately.”
Opponents of allowing partners to receive benefits cite increased costs, but Bazzell disputes that the funding would be prohibitive. Although he noted the university has no official estimate of the cost of covering additional people, Bazzell said the experiences of other universities suggest it is often less than expected.
“Across the country, the cost is usually smaller than originally estimated,” he said. “There is a cost, but it tends to be fairly minimal.”
With state law unlikely to change in the near future, UW will continue to offer legal benefits, like access to facilities, to domestic partners, Bazzell added.
“We try to extend benefits to everyone we can, but [health insurance] is the key one.”
