Partner Hiring and the Economic Crash

In my last post, I asked what hiring institutions could do to help new faculty members adjust to their new campus. Predictably — and understandably — one responder immediately replied, “Hire. Their. Spouse.”

The Chronicle forums devote an entire board to the two-body problem, and I understand the challenge firsthand. My wife is an academic who has faced career struggles, made worse by the fact that she is in a field with few opportunities.

The area of spousal or partner accommodation is yet another place where the current recession is going to have serious negative consequences. In the past, when we recruited a candidate and needed to find work for that hire’s partner or spouse, we were usually able to find something, although it wasn’t always optimal. However, “finding something” was contingent on having at least some discretionary money available.

Up until recently, most institutions have had at least some capacity to make such discretionary expenditures. But the recession, the collapse of state funding and endowment revenues, and the as-yet unknown effect of those trends on enrollments, have been so quick, and so severe, that even rich institutions have little or no discretionary money or financial flexibility to help provide reasonable employment for a candidate’s partner.

I know that my own institution, which is reasonably comfortable financially, could not possibly make a substantial commitment to a partner hire this year, no matter how much we might want to. Even laying aside all of the other complexities of partner hiring, from institutional need to the vagaries of internal politics, the economic challenges to higher education right now are almost surely going to undo any good in this area that has been accomplished in the last generation or so of faculty hiring.

Has your institution cut back on spousal accommodation? And how severely?