The Benefit Equality Campaign has continued into the spring semester, with the student group Friends with Benefit Equality delivering a letter on Monday to the office of Chancellor Jimmy Cheek about the issue.
The issue is a pursuit for benefits provided to spouses of UT faculty to be available to homosexual and heterosexual domestic partners of UT faculty, who for whatever reason are not married either by choice or because they have no legal means to.
The campaign’s roots go back to April 2012, when Faculty Senate unanimously passed a resolution to pursue benefits of some kind to domestic partners of faculty. Then in September, Cheek and Agriculture Chancellor Larry Arrington sent a three-paragraph letter to the Faculty Senate stating that they could not extend any benefits.
The chancellors’ reasoning was that the university is a state institute and that the benefits Faculty Senate suggested to be provided were “inconsistent with the public policy of our state outlined in constitutional and statutory provisions.”
Since then, Faculty Senate and other groups have taken a variety of action to express their dissatisfaction with the chancellors’ brief response. Toward the end of the fall semester, Cheek said at another Senate meeting that he was working on a second, more detailed response, which would be released in a few weeks.
With still no response from Cheek, Friends with Benefit Equality drafted and delivered a letter to the chancellor encouraging either a response or, ideally, a move to provide some benefits. They also delivered a poster board that said, “New Year’s Resolution Benefit Equality.”
This is not the first letter that the group has given to Cheek. The first one was taken to the administrative offices of Andy Holt Tower last semester. Part of this second letter’s intent is to try and get Cheek to not only respond to that first letter also to get some sort of response to the equal benefits campaign as a whole.
Robert Naylor, sophomore in global studies and primary writer of the letter, said that he hopes that this time around the chancellor will provide a response.
“I feel like this time since we gave him a larger thing to look at (the poster board),” Naylor said, “he’ll be more apt to read the letter because I doubt he even read the first one, because he didn’t respond.”
Friends with Benefit Equality is a student conglomerate group that represents several other student organizations, including All Campus Theater, Amnesty International, the Beatitudes Society, the Harry Potter Alliance, the Lambda Student Union, the Progressive Student Alliance and Students Promoting Environmental Action in Knoxville (SPEAK). Naylor said that there are several other student organizations that are thinking about joining.
Both the first and second letter were written to get a response from Cheek on the equal benefits issue. Friends with Benefit Equality are hoping to set up some sort of meeting to have further discussion on the issue. Ideally they want the chancellor to begin the process of providing equal benefits, but at the very least, they would be somewhat satisfied with getting some sort of official response from the chancellor.
Jennifer Dobbins, senior in political science, edited Naylor’s letter. She said that another aspect of the letter is clarification of the chancellors’ first response from September.
“There is a goal for us to making this letter,” Dobbins explained. “We really just want some sort of a response from the administration of UT explaining their response to the UT Faculty Senate.”
Dobbins and the Friends with Benefit Equality’s issue with chancellors Cheek and Arrington’s response was that the reason they cannot provide some sort of benefits to domestic partners is because it doesn’t comply with the state’s policies. Friends with Benefit Equality want Cheek and the administration to explain which state policies are being referred to and how exactly they clash with a new benefit policy.
Cheek was not in his office, but the letter was to be delivered upon his return. UT administration did not have an immediate response to the letter or the Benefit Equality Campaign as a whole.
