The Fairness of Partner Hiring

In a recent post here, I discussed how the recession is making it even more difficult for colleges and universities to provide employment (or even real placement assistance) to partners of prospective hires. A few days later, The Chronicle published an article, “Employment for Spouses Gets Harder to Find,” that took up, and expanded on, the same issue.

In the comments to my post, people raised several questions about partner hiring. One of the overriding issues concerned fairness: Is any substantial effort to accommodate the partner of a potential hire “fair” to the other candidates? Do such efforts unjustly disadvantage candidates without partners? Is academe’s approach to partner hiring a deviation from practices in the “real world”?

As I have said before, when a college or university recruits a new faculty member, its main concern should be to make the best possible hire for its particular needs and circumstances. In that light, if the “best possible faculty member” seeks a partner accommodation, then the primary purpose of the search is best served by trying to meet that request.

Most important, partner accommodations are actually not a zero-sum game. One of the main reasons why the economic crisis has made such accommodations more difficult now is that institutions usually do not offer existing jobs to partners; they create new positions when the top candidate makes a request. Every institution has an array of unmet staffing needs that aren’t sufficiently urgent to rise to the top during regular budgeting processes. However, if several such needs can be met by a candidate’s partner, little pockets of money can often be assembled from different places to make a new position possible.

In such cases, there is no job “lost” to other candidates by the accommodation. It’s actually arguable that the hiring institution’s actions in creating a new position increase the pool of available jobs by one (or at least reduce the competition for those jobs by one, presumably qualified, candidate). Except in the most abstract sense, no other candidate is harmed by such an accommodation.

The problem now, of course, is that those little pockets of money don’t exist in most institutions. Because of that loss of flexibility, partner accommodations are now much harder to provide than they would have been even a year ago. What is at work here, unfortunately, is the rough justice of the larger market, not any academic principles about fairness in hiring.