William & Mary is one of Virginia's academic jewels and is also the second oldest university in America with only Harvard being older. As such, William & Mary competes on a high level for the best faculty and researchers. And now, William & Mary's outgoing Rector is warning that Virginia's ban on gay marriage will harm William & Mary and by extension, Virginia's other top colleges and universities because top academics simply will not want to take positions that would require moving to a socially backward, anti-gay state. Ken Cuccinelli and his equally insane GOP ticket mates may scoff, but bigotry does carry a price. Here are highlights from the Washington Post:
Jeff Trammell, a D.C. lobbyist and gay Democratic activist, was elated when the Supreme Court ruled in late June that the federal government must treat legally married gay couples the same as married heterosexual couples.
But as the outgoing leader of the College of William and Mary’s governing Board of Visitors, Trammell also worried that the ruling would make Virginia’s vaunted public universities less attractive for gay academics.
The high court decision adds “a substantial incentive for our gay and lesbian faculty and staff to leave the Commonwealth’s public universities and colleges,” Trammell wrote to other Virginia higher education leaders in a June 26 e-mail, hours after the ruling was issued.
Trammell had earlier noted — in a letter on June 11 — that the presidents of the University of Virginia, George Mason University and William and Mary had pushed for the state to allow public universities to offer domestic partner health benefits in late 2009. That effort stalled after Gov. Robert F. McDonnell (R) took office in January 2010.
We already have lost valued gay and lesbian faculty to our competitors who do not discriminate. With changes in federal benefits soon available to legally married gay couples, we will lose more. Two able individuals told me [recently] that they are leaving for another state — one a top professor [in a science-technology field] and another a university administrator just recruited to Virginia a few years ago.
At a minimum, the state should immediately allow our public colleges and universities to offer health insurance and other equal benefits to the same-sex partners of their faculty and staff. The commonwealth is undervaluing our universities and their attractiveness to businesses that prize education. Everyone, Democrats and Republicans, needs to come together to end this discrimination.
Some gay and lesbian faculty and staff — including at the University of Virginia, George Mason, Virginia Commonwealth, Virginia Tech and William and Mary — have sent me their stories: senior professors whose partners had cancer and no health insurance; researchers who left the commonwealth, taking major grants with them; faculty who, unlike their straight colleagues, are paying out of their pockets for costly individual policies for their partners and who resent the discrimination; young professors and administrators who are looking to leave the state; and so forth.
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