The Atlantic, How to Marry Into Academia:
According to a Stanford Study [Dual-Career Academic Couples: What Universities Need to Know], about 36 percent of academics at research universities are married or partnered with another academic. It’s so common, in fact, that professors have a name for it: the “two-body problem.” And the problem has only become more apparent. …
Colleges and universities even have a formalized response. When the two-body problem arises, departments may engage in a practice known as partner hiring: They ask their deans or the heads of other departments to find or create a job for the partner of a person they’d like to hire. Sometimes those extra jobs are tenure-track (the kind that scholars want most), but other times they are something less: lectureships, research positions, or even staff positions such as project managers. Some schools allocate part of their budget for partner hires every year, considering it a recruitment expense. Others turn to regional contacts, hoping to place scholars at nearby institutions for mutual benefit.
The practice of accommodating academic spouses is now second nature in higher education. It’s part of the furniture of academic life, casting its shadow across every school and each department. Partner hiring is widely understood to be beneficial and even necessary when it comes to faculty recruitment. But its effects on the academic labor market, and on the research and educational practice of colleges and universities, is still poorly understood. Hiring—or refusing to hire—academic partners can have a dramatic impact on morale; and faculty are hardly of one mind about its virtue.
The American public, whose trust in higher ed is at historic lows, may wonder why an employment practice that would seem shocking in most other industries is so commonplace on campuses. (Imagine if jobs were handed out to spouses at investment banks, aerospace contractors, or magazines.) This may be seen as evidence that higher ed is out of touch with reality. Or else it might be taken to suggest that colleges and universities are far ahead of that reality—that they can even be a model, if imperfect, for businesses that understand their workers as members of families too.
If partner hiring sounds like nepotism, that’s because it is, by definition. During the first half of the 20th century, most universities maintained strict policies that prohibited the recruitment of wives and husbands into faculty positions at the same school or department. This rule may have kept some unqualified spouses out of academia, but it also prevented many qualified spouses—in particular, many qualified women—from securing jobs. …
Over time, schools dropped the anti-nepotism rules and looked for new ways to manage a tricky situation. Clearly, recruiting and retaining the best professors required making accommodations for their spouses. The schools that did so performed better than the ones that didn’t. …
Beyond recruitment, schools may gain other advantages by competing for partners, says Lisa Wolf-Wendel, a professor at the University of Kansas and a co-author of The Two-Body Problem: Dual-Career-Couple Hiring Practices in Higher Education.
As a university professor whose spouse is not an academic, I’ll admit that I have struggled to accept the doctrine of partner hires. Why should someone be handed a second job and income for the happenstance of their family life, when my household would never get the same consideration? That prejudice only worsened when I saw friends, acquaintances, and job candidates turn down really good partner deals that didn’t meet their expectations—a high-paid staff job created expressly for a partner, for example, or a long-term faculty position that wasn’t also on the tenure track. And surely office life is complicated by partner hires. I once interviewed for a job in a small academic department where, by my count, 40 percent of the faculty were married to each other. It seemed incestuous. …
[C]ollege-educated couples in any industry tend to be drawn to major metropolitan areas with more opportunities for them to seek out dual careers. As industry and population has consolidated into fewer, larger cities, the small or midsize ones have suffered. Perhaps nonacademic employers in those places would be smart to lure workers with family deals, just like the deans in higher ed. Or maybe colleges and universities, with their endowments and tax exemptions, should take a greater interest in their local communities, and invest the same money they’d devote to hiring a second tenure-track professor into jobs at area companies.
A “family business,” when it doesn’t refer to the Mafia, has always been seen as a moral and economic good in America. We celebrate the mom-and-pop establishment—not just for its service to a community, but for its embrace of the idea that affection and commitment can be a catalyst for labor. Professors (and other professionals) might portray themselves as superior to such common ideas, but of course they are not.
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