Benefits not offered to all

UCF stands for opportunity.

But those opportunities are limited for full-time faculty seeking partnership benefits.

Michael Freeman, the training coordinator for the Office of Diversity Initiatives, thinks UCF is "losing talented gay and lesbian faculty and staff because they are not offered the same benefits that our straight faculty and staff are offered."

Because Florida does not recognize gay marriage, public universities in the state, including UCF, exclude domestic partners from the state insurance plan.

Many universities and colleges around the nation have found a way to insure domestic partners and their families regardless of their marital status.

The University of Florida is one of them.

In January 2007, an individual fund, outside of the set aside state funds, was created by UF for domestic partners, according to Wanda Santana, the benefits manager at UF.

"The University of Florida needed to attract faculty members, and the best ones, and for that we need to offer what the best universities in the United States are offering to their employees," she said. "That includes a domestic partner plan, and we also have employees that are in domestic partner relationships, so we also wanted to include those employees."

According to Santana, UF has 65 domestic partner policies out of 14,000 employees.
The total monthly premium for domestic partner benefits is nearly $7,200, about $110 per partnership.

"There are some faculty members that [UCF] can't even recruit to this campus either because they are gay or lesbian or because they are straight allies who say ‘why would I want to work at a place where there is this kind of discrimination going on,' " Freeman said.

On April 20, 2005, the United Faculty of Florida brought the issue of domestic partnerships before the Board of Trustees, but nothing was passed.

"The university made it clear after we had extensive discussions and research back and forth that they were unwilling to consider domestic partner benefits," said Jim Gilkeson, the chief negotiator for the UFF chapter of UCF. "Their claim was that to do so would be in violation of state law, so they refused."

Gilkeson thinks that other universities were able to "get around the law" by accepting private donations to create an individual fund for these benefits.

"It was made clear to us that President Hitt did not see that as a priority," he said.
The UFF at UCF will begin to bargain for a three-year agreement this year that will continue to fight for benefits.

Representatives for UCF could not be contacted by the time of publication.

"Trying to get independent coverage in this day and age is next to impossible," Gilkeson said, "It's affecting real people in real ways, and so we as a union are opposed to that kind of discrimination, and when you discriminate against people and the basis of the benefits that you offer, you are discriminating against them in a real way."

By not offering competitive packages to employees, Gilkeson said, "it presents [UCF] as being a not good place for faculty to come to, on that level, and that hurts students, because they are not getting the best faculty possible."