Many employees do not feel like the university has not held up its promises for benefits they had arranged when they came to work at TCU.
“There are lots of people who are worse off as a result of this, and they are not in a good position to respond,” said Robert Vigeland, task force chair and accounting professor. “When you retire and you’re not healthy, where are you going to come up with an additional $5,000 a year to pay for your health care costs? It’s a serious problem.”
Last Tuesday, faculty, staff and retirees got together for a roundtable discussion to clarify the needs of personnel over the report on the Task Force on the TCU Promise.
This round table event was held in view of the upcoming meeting with administration.
“If we are promised something, and that promise is not fulfilled, then what other promises are they going to break? And when are they going to break them,” said Emily Burgwyn, retired director of student affairs information services.
Broken promises and worries expressed at the roundtable have led to change in faculty and staff’s feelings toward TCU.
“I’m absolutely convinced this has affected morale,” said Vigeland. “There are a lot of people, like me, who are very disappointed about this decision.”
A group of six faculty, staff and retirees are going to represent stakeholders in meetings with administration, beginning April 13.
“There is a lot of misunderstanding about this issue still. It is amazing, and frankly, I think part of this is due to the way the change was communicated by the administration,” said Vigeland. “They were not very forthcoming.”
Jan Quesada, a religion professor and ex oficio task force member, and Vigeland both said that while the new plan has decreased TCU’s immediate liability expense to retiree’s to about $40 million, but the new plan will not permanently keep cost down for the university.
“Everybody understands that healthcare costs are rising,” said Vigeland. “A lot of Universities have responded by eliminating retiree healthcare benefits, so we are very fortunate that we still have retiree healthcare benefits even though it is reduced from what it previously was.”
Emotions of some roundtable attendees ran extremely high. Many are frustrated by TCU’s lack of communication when it came to changing benefits without consulting employees and retirees.
“I hope they realize that this was a paradigm shift in how universities govern themselves,” said Burgwyn. “There really was no input, accept from the board and administration. We were not involved, staff were not involved, and that is typically not how the university had run up to this point.”
The goal of the roundtable was to give current and former employees a say in how they have been affected by the benefit changes.
“I think the biggest change was that we didn’t understand how Medicare worked, after you’ve selected a plan, and we’ve learned that this year,” said Burgwyn. “I think we need to go back to the table with what we’ve learned.”
Many employees at the meeting expressed concern for how TCU was treating employees that had felt like a family in the past.
“TCU has always been a family, and they have always treated their employees as a family, they would never make one of them go beg for money because they couldn’t afford their medication, that was way out of the realm of possibility at TCU,” said Burgwyn. “But that’s what is happening now, and it is a different way to look at things.”
One of the primary goals of the task force report is to propose possible remedies for the negative consequences of the change on both retirees and current employees.
“There are lots of things that they can do to take some of the burden off of the backs of retirees,” said Vigeland, “particularly those who are not well.”
Throughout April, the retiree benefit issue will be revisited. Jan Quesada, an ex officio member of the task force and the chair of Faculty Senate, wrote in an email that those working to resolve this issue do not have a timeline, but are hopeful that some sense of resolution will emerge from their meetings in April.