In today’s First Person article, Joseph Kay, an English-department chairman writing under a pseudonym, argues for limiting spousal hires.

While there’s an upside to hiring both partners of a married couple in the same department — e.g., it may reduce turnover — the potential negatives vastly outnumber the positives, he writes.

Kay insists it’s unfair to a tenure candidate to have “two separate tenured people voting as one, especially if the candidate has managed somehow to offend one of the members of the couple.” It’s particularly problematic for “a small program to hire even one likeminded couple, when it means the couple would constitute an automatic faction,” he writes.

And what if the couples divorce? The presence of angry former spouses in the same department is a recipe for trouble, he writes.

Those who are already married to fellow academics should...

Harry Brighouse, a philosophy professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who blogs over at Crooked Timber, ponders the meaning of academic freedom.

It’s important for professors to have a certain amount of autonomy, but academic freedom is not a get-out-of-jail-free card, he writes. When too many professors call upon it “to defend bad practices,” the concept becomes meaningless, Mr. Brighouse argues. Academic freedom doesn’t excuse professors from having to justify their teaching or research on its merits, nor does it exempt them from living up to reasonable societal expectations of scholars, he writes.

Professors should be free to choose and pursue their research, but “academic freedom even in research is not unrestricted,” he argues:

If one’s department has a research mission and the specialty in which one was hired is crucial to that mission, even after one has...

Ever wonder which superhero would make the best community-college dean? Professor X of the X-Men gets Dean Dad’s vote:

First of all, he’s ex-faculty. “Professor?” Oh yeah. Also, he’s in a wheelchair, so you’ve got some affirmative-action cred. But most of all, Charles Xavier is a telepath. A telepath. How useful would it be to be able to read minds? Imagine how he could manage meetings and figure out faculty and state problems? Better still, he can alter people’s minds. Oh my.

FACULTY: Dammit, Charles, this isn’t fair!

X: Are you sure? [activates mental powers]

FACULTY: Uh…no. You’re absolutely right. Now I’m going to leave and be happy with my job, and thankful that you’re helping me get it done. I’m here to guide the minds of tomorrow!

X: Thanks for stopping by, professor.

FACULTY: No, no, the pleasure was mine. Would you like me...

Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard University’s newly appointed president (and its first female president), may have chipped the academic glass ceiling, but many female academics continue to hit their heads against it, writes Robert Drago, a professor of labor studies and women’s studies at Pennsylvania State University at University Park, in a recent Chronicle Careers column.

While record numbers of women are joining the professoriate, female academics are much more likely than their male counterparts to end up in low-paying adjunct jobs, where they have little time for research and the opportunities for advancement are therefore slim. According to a 2006 report from the American Association of University Professors, a whopping 65 percent of American academics held non-tenure-track jobs in 2003, up from 43 percent in 1975, and three-quarters of the contingent academics in 2006 were women....

Ever wonder how job announcements are written? “Dean Dad,” an anonymous dean who writes about administrative life on his blog, Confessions of a Community College Dean, reveals how it’s done.

Contrary to popular belief, search committees aren’t just out to make life hard for job seekers. “Hiring in contrast to the ad is a recipe for a lawsuit,” so job announcements often have to be specific and vague at the same time, Dean Dad explains. It’s very important to use language that gives the committee the flexibility to hire the best applicant in the pool, “even if that means going in a slightly different direction than originally hoped,” he writes.

Dean Dad also describes how hiring committees are assembled. “The composition of a committee can affect the choice it ultimately makes, so it’s more than just ‘who’s willing to serve.’” He says he breaks up...

The University of Colorado Board of Regents just made it easier to dismiss a tenured professor, according to a recent article in The Denver Post:

The University of Colorado Board of Regents on Thursday drastically shortened the amount of time it takes to fire a tenured professor, approving what CU officials believe to be one of the quickest faculty-dismissal timelines in the country.

Under the new timeline, the process will take about 100 days. In the past, it could take years for the university to fire a tenured professor for misconduct.

The streamlined procedures come in the wake of the scandal surrounding Ward Churchill, an ethnic-studies professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, who called the victims of September 11 “little Eichmanns” and who has been accused of plagiarizing and fabricating material in his own research.

The case against Churchill is...

In a recent Chronicle Careers column, Dennis M. Barden, senior vice president and director of the higher-education practice at Witt/Kieffer, tells a true story about how a rumor nearly killed an applicant’s candidacy for a top leadership position:

The time had come to make a selection and an offer.

Then came the rumor: Someone from the candidate’s former place of employment called to make sure [the committee] knew that he and his wife had begun their relationship while still married to other people.

Barden offers advice to search committees and boards of trustees on how to proceed in such sticky situations:

Even if there’s good reason to believe that a candidate would be an outstanding leader, an ugly rumor (whether true or false) could erode his or her leadership effectiveness, so search committees would be wise to consider its potential impact.

Search-committee...

Professors may be a liberal lot, but university policies aren’t as progressive as many professors might think, at least not when it comes to the treatment of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered employees, Astrodyke writes.

She notes that while 92 percent of the top 25 colleges on U.S. News & World Report’s list of America’s best colleges provide equal health coverage to domestic partners and spouses, only 64 percent of the top-100 colleges on the U.S. News list cover domestic partners, and that percentage sinks the farther one goes down the list. In addition, U.S. government laboratories and observatories, where many academic scientists work, do not offer domestic-partner benefits, she writes.

The issue at stake is equal pay for equal work, Astrodyke argues:

If my straight colleague gets health coverage for his wife, and I can’t for my wife, then I’m getting paid less...