Richard Pampuro sliced his forearm on a shard of broken glass at a Cornell University protein-engineering lab in August.
The accident, which the Ph.D. student in chemical engineering says left him with several severed tendons and a destroyed ulnar artery, led graduate-student leaders to ask whether master’s and doctoral students who are injured while doing university-related work have a right to workers’ compensation.
The students think they should.
University administrators think they don’t.
The New York State workers’-compensation board, the authority on the matter, is looking into the question and plans to weigh in.
Rachel McEneny, a spokeswoman for the board, said that officials had contacted Barbara A. Knuth, dean of the Cornell graduate school, to discuss workers’ compensation. An advocate for injured workers will also meet with the graduate-student leaders, Ms. McEneny said.
The aftermath for graduate students who have suffered injuries can be murky, as institutions often don’t post information about how to proceed, workers’ compensation rules vary by state, and the way universities handle such injuries differ widely.
Among Cornell’s peers in the Ivy League, for example, graduate students are covered by workers’ compensation at Columbia University and Dartmouth College. They are not at Brown University. (Officials from the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard, Yale, and Princeton Universities did not immediately provide answers, and their websites do not provide clarity on the topic.)
Workers’ compensation is administered and regulated by each state, so it’s left to each state to define the employer-employee relationship, said Jennifer Wolf Horejsh, executive director of the International Association of Industrial Accident Boards and Commissions.
“That relationship is at the heart of the matter, and that relationship is going to be defined differently in each state,” she said. “There’s a very famous saying around here: If you’ve seen one work-comp system, you’ve seen one work-comp system.”
In New York, people engaged in a teaching or “nonmanual” capacity at a charitable or educational institution are exempted from being covered under workers’ compensation—unless, the law says, “the employer has elected to bring such employees under the law by securing compensation.”
Since Cornell, which is self-insured, appears to have exercised its right to bring in some employees under coverage—faculty members, for instance, are eligible for workers’ compensation—the board wants more information about why Cornell is distinguishing between classes of teachers, that is, faculty members and graduate students, Ms. McEneny said.
“We’ll be asking for legal and policy justification for any such subclassification,” she said.
Case-by-Case Approach
The Cornell students’ concerns touch on whether graduate students, who play a significant role at research universities in teaching undergraduates and conducting research in the labs of faculty members, and are paid for doing so, should be considered as students or employees.
Paul Berry, a member of the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly’s advocacy committee at Cornell, co-wrote a resolution seeking clarification about injured students and calling on the university to provide workers’-compensation coverage to graduate students.
The resolution passed in February without any opposition, and was then sent to university administrators, including David J. Skorton, the president, and the chair of the state’s workers’-compensation board.
In response, Cornell administrators wrote that graduate students under New York State law can be exempt from workers’ compensation, and that injuries are handled by the university on a “case-by-case” basis.
The six-page letter, sent by Ms. Knuth in February to Mr. Berry and other graduate-student leaders, lists several examples of how the university has worked with injured graduate students.
They include giving a six-week stipend without teaching responsibilities to a student diagnosed midsemester with a benign brain tumor requiring surgery, and paying the out-of-pocket medical expenses for two graduate students involved in a chemical explosion.
The injuries are handled on a case-by-case basis, the letter said, “so that the response can be tailored to the circumstances.”
Mr. Berry calls that approach “unacceptable.”
“Thousands of students on campus are at risk each day and have no guaranteed protections or any clear system for resolving disputes in the ‘case-by-case’ system,” he said in an email, “especially in a no-fault situation or one where fault is difficult to establish.”
Ms. Knuth said in an interview that, generally, Cornell can provide for graduate students who are injured in a more-expansive way than workers’ compensation can. All Cornell students have health insurance, she said, and the university, working with the departments, the graduate school, and other campus offices, often provides for out-of-pocket medical expenses and full stipend support while a student who is injured recovers.
Workers’ compensation, she said, covers only a percentage of a person’s salary. In New York, it provides eligible employees with coverage of their medical expenses, Social Security and death benefits, and up to two-thirds of their weekly paychecks, up to a maximum of $803.
“We do not believe a predetermined, highly prescriptive approach is the best, most-supportive way to handle graduate-student injuries in an academic environment, in which the academic plans and endeavors of students are so varied,” Ms. Knuth said in an email.
In 2013, graduate students at Cornell reported 31 injuries, according to the university. Of those, 13 received medical attention, and two were serious enough to require the student to take time away from school, Ms. Knuth said. In the fall, Cornell had nearly 5,200 graduate students, according to its website.
Unclear Protections
After two surgeries and about 40 sessions of physical therapy, Mr. Pampuro said his hand still “feels like wearing a mitten—the fingers all move together.” He’s made significant progress, he said, but his hand will never quite work the same.
The injury was rather mundane, Mr. Pampuro said. A bottle containing Jell-O-like bacterial-growth media slipped from his grasp after he removed it from a microwave. What precisely followed is hazy, he said, but he believes he cut his arm on the broken glass as he recoiled from the spill.
When he returned to Cornell two weeks later and tried to sort out billing matters, Mr. Pampuro said, he became frustrated because he could not find clear answers about how to proceed. He declined to publicly discuss details about what support Cornell offered him because his case is still open. Ms. Knuth, citing student privacy concerns, also declined to speak about the case.
Mr. Pampuro said he was not sure whether workers’ compensation would have provided better benefits to him than Cornell offered. But that’s beside the point, he said, because the workers’ compensation would be clearer and more defined.
“It’s very frightening for graduate students to expose themselves to risk and not know that they’re taken care of if something goes wrong,” he said. “A very clear statement of coverage that emulates what’s guaranteed to those around them working in the same spaces and doing the same work would give peace of mind to graduate students.”
