I still recall the giddy sense of elation I had when my wife, Susan, was offered an assistant professorship at a campus I'll call Crestridge College. At long last, an anxious year of applications and interviews was over. Susan had certain criteria for her first tenure-track job, and Crestridge seemed almost ideal. Its emphasis on teaching provided plenty of opportunities for faculty-student interaction, which was very important to my wife. The college was in a part of the South that we both found attractive, and to make it even better, it was only about a day's drive from both our families.
My elation was mixed with a great deal of personal relief. Now that Susan was employed, I could finally quit the industrial-management position I had held for the duration of her doctoral work. When she first applied to grad school she was told it should take only about three years to complete her Ph.D. When I took the manager's job, three years didn't seem like a long time to work in conditions I frequently thought of in Dantean metaphors. However, university promises aren't always etched in stone, and three years stretched to six.
I spent those years descending into the depths of the employment Inferno (I mean this somewhat literally -- there was no air conditioning in my sweltering factory). The work grew more loathsome, but I was reluctant to seek another job while my wife was in school. I dreamed of the time when Susan would land a tenure-track position. I could leave the factory and work on my writing, possibly taking a part-time job on the side. I was ready to relish life as a Faculty Spouse.
When Crestridge called, it appeared that our dreams had come true.
During my wife's interview at Crestridge, she was drawn by a number of appealing things about the college. There was a large pool of faculty-development money available for research. Her departmental colleagues seemed warm and supportive. Located in a relatively rural area, Crestridge had a calming, bucolic charm to it and seemed somewhat immune from the bitter and nasty political squabbling that had marked my wife's graduate program. I gleefully quit my job, we sold our house, bid farewell to friends and family, loaded up the rental truck, and moved to paradise.
Soon after arriving, the promises made and the perceptions presented at the interview began to unravel. The first to disappear was the possibility of research money -- something my wife had been looking forward to. The slight bitterness that only unkept promises can bring began to flavor our lives, and this was immediately exacerbated by our choice of peers. The "warm and supportive" colleagues we initially socialized with turned out to be angry and divisive whiners. They seemed to relish the hours they spent dissecting every minor mistake made by the Crestridge administration. We became increasingly unhappy with the place, but kept telling ourselves that it would get better.
As we tried to put a good light on our crumbling image of academic nirvana, the pressures of tenure-track life began to soak up more of my wife's time. We had spent very little time together while she was writing her dissertation, often seeing each other for about 20 minutes in the morning. I'd be going out the door to work as she came down the stairs from her study after working all night, exhausted and ready to grab a few hours' sleep. We had no illusions about the pressures of faculty life, but the reality of it at Crestridge was something that had to be experienced firsthand.
Susan was soon engulfed by committee work and other pressures. "Your courses must be academically challenging," she had been told, but the reality turned out to be something different. Sure, she was supposed to be tough, but students evaluated professors and tended to destroy those who graded harshly, and those evaluations counted in the tenure process. Senior faculty members had closed ranks and would not discuss this disparity between the "myth of rigor" and the need for good teaching evaluations. Understandably, Susan became very anxious about her teaching, spending long hours on class prep. Most nights during the week we would see each other about 10 p.m., and spend an hour or two together before we went to bed.
Crestridge is a small college, with fewer than 80 faculty members, so it wasn't uncommon for most of the faculty to come to campus social events. It wasn't long before we were both invited to a faculty party. I envisioned something like the grad-student parties my wife and I had attended, where students and significant others mingled as peers. Conversations at those parties shifted from topic to topic, often focusing on the grad program, but just as frequently covering other territory. Grad students and partners all had equal input.
What a difference it was at a Crestridge faculty party, where it quickly became obvious that, at least in the eyes of many of the senior professors, my wife's junior status didn't give her permission to say much. My status was even lower, and I was accorded the right to sit around quietly and nod at the wisdom that poured from the mouths of the senior faculty members. Since we were under the oppressive yoke that ensnares the untenured professor, I found myself biting my tongue and not adding to the conversation, lest my wife be punished later when these self-anointed elders rendered judgment on her in the tenure committee.
Given this elitist snobbery by the senior faculty members, I hoped that our relations with the junior scholars would be better. We did make a few friends among Susan's peers. Still, I was sometimes told, in no uncertain terms, what my place in the pecking order was. At one party a junior faculty member initiated a conversation with me. A few minutes into our talk (which was relatively interesting), a senior professor came into the room. Seeing an opportunity to chat with someone powerful, the junior faculty member curtly told me that our conversation was "boring," and walked over to talk with the senior professor. Clearly, chatting with a mere faculty spouse wasn't as important as working on his career.
At least these experiences gave me a thicker skin. And I learned to take the elitism with a peck of salt. My next challenges would be to negotiate the job market in a small town, find some friends of my own, and learn how to survive as a male house-husband in a largely conservative community. Ah, the life of the Faculty Spouse.
