Part-time New School faculty are upset about changes the university made to their health insurance that they say has raised costs and lowered the ability to receive quality care. More than 850 New School faculty, staff, students, and outside supporters have signed a petition, which is addressed to President Dwight McBride, to work with part-time faculty regarding the reductions in healthcare benefits.
The New School changed the health insurance plan offered to part-time faculty on Jan. 1, triggering a rise in healthcare costs for professors. The petition, created by part-time faculty and representatives from ACT-UAW Local 7902, a union of academic workers at The New School, stated that the rise in costs occurred while “faculty wages and retirement contributions were frozen as part of the ‘pandemic recovery plan,’ which limits faculty ability to cover the escalating costs. Additionally, many part-time faculty are not earning wages due to mass course cancelations.” So far, professors that The New School Free Press spoke to have said that the response from the administration has not been satisfactory.
This change in part-time faculty insurance came as part of the university’s pandemic recovery plan. The university disclosed the pandemic’s effects on their finances in October when it released a document that outlined steps it has taken and future plans in response. The financial cuts, course cancellations, layoffs, and other changes outlined in the document have been criticized and protested against by New School students and staff and called “austerity” by professors. Articles in Jacobin Magazine and The New York Times have also criticized The New School’s response to its financial crisis in the past year.
Professors who spoke to the Free Press said that they are now hesitant to go to the doctor, as the changes in the new plan leaves them unsure of how much treatments will cost.
“It’s a bit like a game of roulette. You get a certain treatment and you don’t know what you’re going to be charged until you are charged,” said Douglas Morse, a Media Studies professor who spearheaded the creation of the petition along with a handful of part-time faculty. “Being on a new plan in the midst of a pandemic just contributes to very high levels of anxiety and worry, both financial anxiety and emotional anxiety for faculty not knowing what costs they’re going to have to pay.”
Morse has taught screenwriting and script analysis at The New School for more than 20 years and said that he has had a back injury since last summer. “This sort of charge for people like me, people who have injuries, who are sick, [they] start avoiding going to the doctor, which is completely counterproductive.”
“We’re supposed to be The New School, supposed to be a progressive institution. This is a regressive charge that discourages people from seeing medical professionals… I’ll say it again, because it really upsets me. It is putting the cost more on those needing treatment,” he said.
The New School is one of few institutions that gives its part-time faculty healthcare benefits, but the majority of faculty working at the university are, in fact, working part-time. New School spokesperson Amy Malsin said that 80 percent of the New School’s more than 2000 faculty were part time.
Representatives of the ACT-UAW Local 7902 union told the Free Press that part-time faculty were notified of the insurance change last fall and were given two months to decide whether to continue with the new plan.
The professors claimed that they made several requests to the administration to get more information on the new plan when it was announced, but that they could not get enough details on the plan to make an informed decision at the time.
“For many of us, it was not really a choice,” said Tamar Samir, a professor who teaches at Parsons and The New School for Public Engagement. “[They] basically said, ‘Your insurance is going to roll over to this. Or, you can choose not to be enrolled.’ But there wasn’t really a choice. It was a false choice and it was an uninformed choice.”
For Samir, whose wife is also dependent on her insurance, the insurance change meant having to end her over 20-year long relationship with her primary care physician. “He doesn’t take my [new] insurance, so I’ll have to find a different one. Those relationships, in an ideal world, they’re really important relationships where the health care provider is a caregiver and someone that you trust and who cares for you. And to start breaking those relationships in the middle of a pandemic is really, really unfortunate.”
Another issue that the petition highlighted is that many part-time faculty at The New School are not earning wages at the moment due to “mass course cancellations.” Alex Robins, a part-time professor who teaches fashion studies at Parsons, had his courses cut by the university due to the pandemic. “It would have been my third year [teaching] this year if the pandemic hadn’t canceled my courses,” he said.
Details on the plan
Samir came forward with her course appointment letter to the Free Press. For the required undergraduate first-year course she teaches, she is paid $6,133 before taxes. She highlighted a discrepancy in her salary versus the amount of money the university makes in student tuition. “So for the 3-credit course that I teach with 18 students in it (Parsons students pay $1700 per credit according to the New School website), The New School is making $91,000,” she said.
“[The university] is already treating us like second-class citizens in terms of pay rate. So now [they’re] going to put a larger burden on us,” said Morse.
The new healthcare plan covers health, vision, prescription and dental policies and is administered by Aetna Health Care. The plan introduced an increased premium — the monthly amount paid by professors to insurance — and a 10 percent coinsurance — the percentage of some medical bills that are not covered by insurance and is paid by professors.
“We are being asked to pay more for health care that covers less. It’s as simple as that.” Samir said. “In the midst of a pandemic with all of these concessions that we’ve made regarding our salary and our retirement accounts, it’s as one faculty put it — we were betrayed in the middle of a pandemic.”
Robins said that the new plan is “a significant deviation from the plan that existed under United HealthCare” of the past, and that this does not just affect faculty but also the dependents of faculty under this insurance. Both Professors Robins and Morse said that the new plan is particularly putting the burden on older faculty and older dependents of faculty. “There’s now a 10 percent coinsurance for hospice care, which didn’t exist previously.” said Robins.
Morse continued by saying “Anyone who has a long term illness such as a covid long hauler or anyone who needs medications or tests on an ongoing basis, anyone who tries to manage a chronic illness, the burden of the health insurance costs are going to fall more heavily on them.”
“There are also procedures that are simply no longer covered and previously were fully covered. Some infertility treatments, for example, certain infusion drugs are no longer covered. So there’s a lot of things that if you are someone suffering from a specific illness, you’ve really been left hanging in the wind or you’ve been left without that support at this point,” said Robins.
Response from the University
The union has filed a formal grievance with the university, which calls for members of management and members from the union leadership to attempt to negotiate and find a resolution on this matter. They have not yet decided whether to proceed with arbitration.
Annie Larson, professor at Parsons and unit chair for ACT-UAW Local 7902, said that organizers delivered the petition to President McBride on April 9 and they received a response from the university three days later.
The response, from Senior Vice President and Chief of Staff Jennifer Hobbs, thanked the organizers for their thoughts on the rising healthcare costs but deferred to the grievance process already underway.
“While we appreciate this remark, our experience in obtaining meaningful information from the University has been an ongoing challenge,” said Larson, who added that it took the organizing campaign and petition just to get the university to release more information about the healthcare plan.
Malsin, the New School’s spokesperson, told the Free Press via email that the university made their changes after careful consideration.
“Following extensive research on which choices would best fit the needs of our entire community — including benchmarking our plan design against other universities and non-profit organizations in New York City and elsewhere — we made a carefully considered decision to change certain aspects of our plan,” Maslin wrote. “To further control the rising costs of healthcare services, the university separately decided to switch plan administration to Aetna.
The university has continued to contribute 90% of healthcare premiums for employees who receive lower wages to offset healthcare costs. This allocation ensures that when cost increases result in higher premiums, the university is paying 90 cents on every dollar.”
Morse and Robins claimed that the 10 percent coinsurance is a violation of their contract.
“A lot of part time faculty are artists or juggling multiple part time jobs. And so that is a massive imposition on our members. And I think, crucially, you feel a violation of the contract with universities to offer a comparable plan,” said Morse.
Robins added by saying “The concern is that in the previous years, there wasn’t this mechanism of the 10% coinsurance. And so when you compare them year to year, this is a significant increase. And that would violate the language that says that they are obligated from year to year to provide us a comparable plan.”
“If students just take a second to reflect and say, oh, yeah, this is someone who’s more than just a teacher,” Morse said. “This is a person who has a job, has to work, has to take care of their health, and has to pay their bills.”
CORRECTION: A previous version of this article misstated how often coinsurance is charged. It is charged on some medical bills, not all medical bills.