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August 20, 2008, 07:40 AM ET
More Professors Hired as Couples
Thirty-six percent of professors at the nation’s leading universities have partners who are also professors, and the proportion of faculty members who are hired as couples is on the rise. But even the nation’s top research universities usually hire academic couples without written guidelines, raising questions about fairness and academic standards.
Those nuggets of information are among the findings in a hefty new report on academic couples by Stanford University’s Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research, “Dual-Career Academic Couples: What Universities Need to Know.” The institute’s 98-page study—based on its 2006 survey of 9,043 faculty members at 13 top research universities—is one of the largest and most-detailed examinations yet of faculty couples. The 13 universities are not named in the report, but they are representative of the country’s top research institutions, said Londa Schiebinger, director of the institute and a professor of the history of science at Stanford.
The report’s authors wanted to study couples in academe because, they said, dealing with the so-called two-body problem—professors who have academic partners who want jobs at the same institution—is one of the most vexing issues in faculty hiring.
The practice is also controversial. The Stanford study found that 43 percent of the faculty members it questioned said hiring academic couples “prevents open competition.” Nearly 45 percent said couples working in the same academic department create conflicts of interest, and nearly 30 percent said their departments had hired partners who were underqualified. —Robin Wilson
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Categories: Work-and-Life, Faculty-hiring
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