Chancellor Syverud Updates University Senate on Benefits and Intercollegiate Athletics

I’m just going to quickly update on two things from the last meeting. One is benefits and just to say that two situations we were facing that were mentioned at the last meeting are still true. The first one, health care costs have risen by a lot this last year. I looked more into exactly why. It’s greater demand coming out of COVID. It’s the dramatic increase in drug prices, and it’s general inflation. But also there’s an acute shortage of supply of health care providers in the region. I think lots of you know that if you tried to find a primary care provider for somebody moving here. When supply is really tight and demand is really great, costs go up.

We’ve been working with the Employee Benefits Assessment Council, which was created in part on the recommendation of the University Senate, that Tom Dennison chairs, who spoke at the last meeting. In response to what that rise in cost has done, we’ve done two things bearing on open enrollment, which starts Monday morning.

First, we decided that the University should absorb a greater percentage of the cost increases this year, a greater percentage than has been our part in the past. Then separately we also paid very careful attention to the parameters of the separate employee contribution schedule for those folks at the lowest family incomes. Those changes are reflected in the announcements that HR, I think, is going to get out in connection with the open enrollment that starts Monday. So, you’ll be getting a lot more details on that part of it in the next couple of days.

The second issue is what we also talked about, which is this set of high-stakes down-to-the-wire negotiations between the largest local health care providers and Excellus Blue Cross Blue Shield. That has been challenging. Just to remind folks who weren’t at the last Senate meeting, some area hospitals and large physician practices are not happy with what they perceive as the low rates of increase in reimbursement that Excellus is proposing, given the circumstances they’re operating under. Excellus, in the meantime, is bargaining for perceived lower rates, and they say they’re doing so to help keep health care costs down for employers and employees, like Syracuse University. If Excellus and the providers don’t reach agreement, here’s what’s going to happen sometime after Jan. 1:

• For those of you in SU Blue or SU Pro, you’ll be covered by health insurance at those providers, but you’ll be out of network, which practically means a lot more out-of-pocket costs when you visit them. This includes the private hospitals in the area and some of the largest physician practices.
• For employees who have SU Orange insurance from Excellus, they will not be covered if they go to those providers. They will have to pay the full cost then of visiting those providers. The only certain way to hedge against that risk at the moment is to switch to SU Blue or SU Pro, which are more expensive, in open enrollment that starts Oct. 28 and ends Nov. 8.

I want people to know, I think it’s likely that the providers and Excellus will reach agreements by Jan. 1. One of the providers, which is FamilyCare Medical Group, issued a joint statement with Excellus last week that said they were close to an agreement. I do want you to know that based on what I heard in the Senate and as the largest private employer in the region, and Excellus’ largest customer here, we’re doing everything we can to get Excellus and the providers to come to agreement before Jan. 1. But in the meantime, we just have to acknowledge this creates greater difficulty for people in making health care choices during open enrollment. I’m not happy about this. I’m doing everything I can to get things clarified sooner. If there are agreements for some of them before open enrollment ends, we’ll telegraph that right away. You should know, lots of folks, especially in Human Resources, are working hard on this.

Then the other thing is just to tell you about athletics. The next wave of change is coming to intercollegiate athletics. It is going to have wide-range implications, including for academics, for budget, for operations, for students, for the student-athlete experience. I am trying to see around corners and be involved in figuring out how to position Syracuse for this.

The athletic experience here is pretty important to us. It’s part of our defining experience that recruits students, and not just student-athletes. It’s part of our academic programming, it’s part of our brand nationally. It’s very important to why we’ve had fairly significant enrollment success, I believe, in a year when enrollment is down dramatically in many places.

I have been a strong proponent of a plan to unite all 136 Football Bowl Subdivision schools into a single college football league with the National Players Association. It’s called the College Student Football League. It was profiled since the last Senate meeting in The Wall Street Journal and in an op-ed I co-wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

It outlines why I think it’s worth considering and why academics and presidents should step up because of what otherwise may likely happen with athletics.

It’s supported by a significant group of people, but I don’t think that means it’s likely to be the final plan. I’m just hoping it will move the needle from where things are going by default, which is the direction that the SEC and the Big10 athletic directors and commissioners are driving things. That’s a higher education athletics model fueled by billion-dollar contracts from Disney and News Corp, with a relatively small number of large public universities pouring unlimited funds into developing professional football teams. I think the consequences to that are pretty severe, and not just for academics at those universities, but for women’s sports and Olympic sports across all universities in the United States. I think we should be trying to preserve a vibrant athletics culture, a competitive one, that remembers academic priorities of students, that values women’s and Olympic sports, that helps bind alumni to schools and creates rivalries and idiosyncrasies that define college sports right now.

I think that you should realize this is rapidly changing. We are facing right now the settlement of a massive antitrust case. One aspect of it is to create the probability that schools in the major conferences will be paying directly $20 million a year to student athletes, mostly to football players.

I think it’s important for Syracuse to be competitive, but it’s important also to understand the budget implications of that, and the values implication of that. I’ve been trying to get groups to focus on this early and often. We’ve worked through it with the Board of Trustees recently. Faculty Athletic Representative Mary Graham has convened two meetings with stakeholders this week, including faculty, student-athletes, student leaders, and leadership from around the University, including especially the co-chairs of the Senate Athletic Policy Committee. I think the next step, learning from some of our experiences recently, is working through the Senate Athletic Policy Committee to focus on it promptly this year in the Senate and to figure out what other stakeholder groups need to be briefed and discuss the implications of it. We made some progress on that this week.

It’s not a thing that we can spend two years debating because, unfortunately, the landscape might be quite dramatically changed before we can reach a universal consensus in two years. But if the Senate wants to play a meaningful role in this, I need the Senate Athletic Policy Committee to be moving on it fairly soon, reporting on it and information sessions, including for senators who are interested. I need that as well, for student-athletes, for student leaders, and, believe me, there’s plenty of alumni very interested in this as well.

We have a long way to go before this is all going to settle down. Like everything else, it could be affected by the elections. I’m just saying this because if shared governance is going to mean something in this area, we actually have to do the work in this area, and we have to do it soon. Thank you.