In seeming recognition of political realities, the University of California decided late in September not to take a position on the issue of health benefits for the "domestic partners" of its faculty and staff.
On his next-to-last day in office, President Peltason issued a set of "preliminary findings" on the subject of "Extension of Benefits and Amenities to the Domestic Partners of UC Faculty, Staff, and Students." The report comes some 17 months after the Senate's Academic Council voted to request that the University establish as much "symmetry" as possible between the benefits offered to legal spouses and those extended to domestic partners. (More specifically, the Senate called for symmetry between employees' spouses and the children of those spouses on the one hand, and employees' domestic partners and the children of those partners on the other.) Such a change has also been endorsed by the Council of UC Staff Assemblies and the UC Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual Association. While a number of benefits and employee privileges are at issue, the most pressing benefit question is health insurance for domestic partners.
Though noting in a cover letter that extension of benefits "is an important issue that merits serious and careful consideration" by the University, the report the Office of the President issued took no position on whether the University intends to extend health benefits to domestic partners, nor did it take a position on whether it should extend such benefits. Instead, the report simply summarized the factual background of the issue and provided estimates of the costs that would be involved in granting health insurance to domestic partners.
The impetus for this neutrality is not hard to pinpoint; indeed, it is referred to several times in the report: the risk a state-funded agency such as UC would run by seeking to provide to its employees a benefit that the Governor and California Legislature have not seen fit to provide to state workers. Though legally free to extend whatever benefits it wants, the University, beholden to the state for a large part of its budget, must take into account the views held in Sacramento. Thus the report notes that "A decision by the University to expand the definition of benefit eligibility beyond that applicable to State employees should be carefully evaluated so as to minimize concerns within the Legislature or the Governor's Office . . . that might affect the decision-making process on the University's overall budget."
The report would thus seem to leave the issue of benefits for domestic partners where it has been for years: neither disposed of by means of a negative presidential decision, nor moving forward in any meaningful way, but instead suspended, pending action by the state.
"I was disappointed in [the president's] report in one way," said Robert Anderson, a UC Berkeley economics professor and longtime supporter of domestic partner benefits. "The Office of the President took 17 months from the time the Academic Council acted on this, and their report could have been produced within a couple of weeks. There is no substantive, new information in it." Nevertheless, Anderson says he is not discouraged about the prospects for action. "I'm hoping that Atkinson will take a new look at it and view it more favorably."
Within state government, there has been some movement on the issue though prospects for action are uncertain, given that extensions of domestic-partner benefits often are regarded as an unacceptable sanctioning of homosexual unions (in the case of same-sex partner benefits) or an undercutting of the institution of marriage (in the case of opposite-sex benefits).
Two domestic partners bills were passed by the legislature in its 1994 session but were vetoed by Governor Wilson. Similar bills on domestic partners were introduced in the Assembly and Senate in 1995 and are still under consideration. Both would establish criteria for a recognized "domestic partnership" and both would allow for an extension domestic partners benefits to state workers and others through an amendment to the Public Employees' Medical and Hospital Care Act (PEMHCA). The nature of this proposed action has relevance for the University, since, as the Office of the President report notes, "the University has generally followed PEMHCA in regards to overall benefit policy."
UC's Academic Senate has a long history of involvement in the domestic partners issue. Its University Committee on Affirmative Action first considered the issue in 1990-91 in connection with the issue of discrimination against homosexual faculty. This led to an extensive analysis by the University Committee on Faculty Welfare (UCFW), which in June 1993 approved the recommendations that essentially have remained the Senate's position on the issue through the present. The UCFW recommendations were forwarded to campus Senate committees for review and were approved by the Academic Council in April 1994 for transmission to the president.
Throughout the Senate's review process, a point of contention was whether benefits ought to be extended solely to same-sex partners or to same- and opposite-sex partners. In the end, both UCFW and the Council recommended that benefits be extended to both kinds of partnerships, with certification of partnerships established through means of a legally binding contract.
Beyond health benefits, the Senate recommended benefits equivalence in an area the UCOP report did not mention: that of pension and survivor benefits, where several asymmetries exist. In UC's retirement system, for example, spouses of employees coordinated with Social Security receive, at no cost, a 25 percent survivor benefit on the death of their spouse. Any annuitant who wished a domestic partner to receive such a benefit, however, would have to take a reduction in the basic benefit during his or her lifetime.
In recent years, some faculty have argued that extension of domestic partner benefits has become an issue in UC's recruitment and retention of faculty. Five of UC's "comparison-eight" institutions offer domestic partner health benefits , Stanford, MIT, Yale, Harvard, and the University of Michigan , though in each case the benefits are for same-sex domestic partners only.