Benefits struggle begins again
“Insure our families,” say gay UVA staff
When Ellen Bass, an assistant professor in the department of systems and information engineering at UVA, came to the University two years ago, she knew she and her lesbian partner would have problems with the school’s stance on domestic partner benefits.
“I knew I was going to fight this battle,” Bass says. “I didn’t realize it was going to come to a head so quickly.”
The new publicity over UVA’s long refusal to offer domestic partner benefits, which also came to a head when professors challenged the University on benefits more than a decade ago, was stoked by a website created by two 2003 UVA graduates. The site—www.dontgivetouva.com recently went live in its request for alumni donations to fund health benefits for partners of gay UVA employees.
Currently, domestic partners of UVA employees do not receive health insurance or other perqs like the use of gym facilities. And because of Virginia’s strict laws against second-parent adoption, many children of gay couples do not qualify for benefits.
UVA spokesperson Carol Wood says, via e-mail, that the school will be studying the benefits issue “for some time.” In the meantime, Wood says that as UVA is a State agency it must follow Virginia laws, which deem that only married couples qualify for partner benefits. Further, she says, the State has ruled that benefits are “a matter of State law rather than of University policy.” (UVA tabled its efforts to gain more autonomy from the State during the current legislative session.)
The new website’s co-founder, Andrew Borchini, wrote his senior thesis on the domestic partner benefit issue at UVA. Borchini says UVA is losing professors and students to schools that offer benefits, such as the University of Michigan and many others.
“It’s not just a gay thing, it’s a good business decision,” says Dyana Mason, the executive director of gay-rights advocacy group Equality Virginia, of partner benefits.
Borchini and Mason’s claims may prove true in the case of Jenny O’Flaherty, a doctor and associate professor of anesthesiology and pediatrics at UVA Health System. O’Flaherty’s partner and three children do not qualify for benefits at UVA. Purchasing health insurance for the kids imposed a substantial financial drain on the family. Recently, O’Flaherty and her family left for New Zealand, where she is currently on sabbatical.
“One of the reasons we’re in New Zealand is that we were so fed up with the way UVA was treating our family,” O’Flaherty says via e-mail. “We felt we needed to take a break from the place.”
In Bass’ case, she says she chose working at UVA over the University of Michigan because of location and quality of life. Bass says her partner, a social worker, was “really mad” when she learned that she would not qualify for benefits. For several months, the couple had to pay for health insurance for their son, because Bass is “the non-biological co-parent, as we like to call ourselves.
“You hate to choose your job based on the benefits,” Bass says, adding that she shouldn’t have to waste energy on the issue. “I should be worrying about mentoring my students.”
Many Virginia employers that are chartered in other states can and do offer domestic partner benefits. For example, Gary Campbell, the human resources manager at Lexis Publishing, which employs 500 people in Charlottesville, says the company has offered domestic partner benefits for about three years.
In addition, Washington and Lee University and Hollins University, both private Virginia schools, offer benefits to same-sex couples, according to the Human Rights Commission. As does Capital One, a credit card company based in Richmond.
“We believed it was the right thing to do,” says Hamilton Halloway, a spokesman for the company.
Prominent UVA psychology professor Charlotte Patterson and her partner, Deborah Cohn, aren’t buying the school’s excuse that the State has shut the door on domestic partner benefits. Patterson and Cohn, who have three children, both say that UVA, which employs more than 11,000 full-time staff and faculty, has made progress in the equal treatment of gays, but that it is falling behind other elite universities on the benefits issue.
“We’ve been hearing it for 20 years,” Patterson says of UVA’s naysaying on benefits. “I don’t think anybody wants to see UVA become a dinosaur.”—Paul Fain
Meter made
Website Poetry Daily nears a decade of posting verse for the masses
Breaking news: Poetry lives. And so does its audience. Charlottesville too has people snapping their fingers, and “hmmming” to last lines in reading rooms. And Poetry Daily, www.poems.com, the brainchild of Charlottesville residents Don Selby, Diane Boller and Rob Anderson, and self-described as “the world’s most popular poetry website,” points to the existence of those who even like to read the stuff.
Every day since it began in 1997 the website has posted news and a poem a day. Visitors range from military men on research boats in Antarctica to former heavy machine operators logging on from the couches of unemployment in North Dakota, according to a self-conducted survey.
In 1995, Boller and Selby, neither of whom writes poetry, were investigating Web technology for Lexis, the law publishing company where they were working. Behind The Federal Rules of Evidence Manual in Boller’s office, Selby caught a glimpse of a volume of poems by W.S. Merwin. It was fate. Within two years, postings like “Old Man Leaves Party,” by Mark Strand, from Blizzard of One, were appearing on their homepage.
Today, Poetry Daily verges on legendary in certain circles. In 2003, the site got 13.7 million page views and it’s on pace to repeat that volume this year with 1.2 million page views during January. For local furniture maker and poet John Casteen (who shares a name with his better-known father, who runs a certain local university), the website serves him in his roles as both reader and poet. “As a reader it’s a real pleasure to get a daily digest that presents a broad cross-section of contemporary poetry. I use it to keep an eye on individual poets, literary presses and literary journals,” he says.
“As a poet, it gives you an audience roughly 10 times as large as the press run for a first book, which is invaluable if you want people to read your work.”
While it’s a popular site, Selby and Boller aren’t about to dumb-down poetry to suit the masses. The aim is to represent contemporary poetry, plain and simple. “If we hear the bells go off in a poem it goes on [the website],” says Selby. Since the poems are selected from magazines and review copies, Selby and Boller work primarily with publishers for blanket permissions, so they don’t have to pursue copyright permissions each time they want to post a poem.
Last November, the editors and their associates—including co-editor Chryss Yost (who lives in California) and poets Rita Dove and Dana Gioia—released a book, Poetry Daily: 366 Poems from the World’s Most Popular Poetry Website, an anthology of website poems. The poets included run from Wislawa Szymborska to Mark Doty—an illuminating overview of contemporary poetry.
In an oft-quoted essay about poetry, Gioia once promised, “If poets venture outside their confined world, they can work to make [poetry] essential once more.” That pledge underpins Poetry Daily.
“There’s a general audience for literature and fiction,” says Boller. “And we believe that there’s a general audience for poetry and that poetry can be a part of everybody’s life. It’s not just a forum reserved for poets and academics. All literate people can enjoy it.”—Nell Boeschenstein
Camera shy
ACAC bans camera cell phones for privacy’s sake
Citing concerns about the more than 6 million camera cell phones that Americans are now toting, local fitness giant Atlantic Coast Athletic Club recently decided to ban cell phones in the locker rooms of their two locations. Members have thanked ACAC employees for the move, says Hunter Schwartz, ACAC’s director of fitness and wellness. But that’s not because members are grateful to be free of the worry that photos of them in various states of undress will wind up on the Internet. No, most members have said they’re thankful they won’t have to listen to loud cell phone monologues in the locker room anymore, Schwartz says.
The spreading trend of camera phones might not be a big privacy concern in Charlottesville, but the phones have sparked the interest of companies, government agencies and lawmakers in several states. For some, such as automakers in Detroit or the U.S. Air Force, the phones have been banned in restricted areas.
In the case of ACAC and many health clubs around the country, the phones are a problem because of the discreet ease with which a photo can be snapped and then sent to other phones, or even instantly uploaded to a website.
“Most clubs are trending toward” banning cell phones in locker rooms, Schwartz says.
There are legitimate uses for the camera phones, which were first introduced in the United States in late 2002. In addition to snapping and sharing a photo with a friend, camera phones can be used as memory tools, to document accidents, or to help people ask for directions, according to tech guru Alan Reiter, president of Wireless Internet & Mobile Computing, a consulting firm based in Maryland.
The phones have even spawned a new form of blogging—the popular practice of posting musings on the Internet. Called moblogs, the Web sites are produced by Text America, Buzznet and other companies, and work by allowing subscribers to quickly post their pictures on a personalized site.
Though Reiter admits that privacy and security concerns with camera phones are “not to be dismissed,” he says the backlash is “overblown.” Reiter says far smaller, more sophisticated cameras are better tools for industrial espionage or other forms of nosy photography. But with camera phones set to triple the resolution of their photographic capacity in the next year, Reiter says the phones are hardly just a novelty.
“They’re going to explode,” he says. “We have not seen anything yet.”
Ethan Sutin, a 23-year-old research assistant at UVA, bought a Sprint camera phone about four months ago. He says the camera phone was initially a fun way to keep in touch with his sister, who lives in California.
“I never really had any nefarious purposes in mind when I got it,” Sutin says. However, the novelty of the phone quickly faded for him. “I didn’t get that much of a thrill out of it,” he says. —Paul Fain