COLLOQUY

By ROBIN WILSON

More than most other animal biologists, Beth E. Leuck has a passion for plants. In fact, next month she'll travel once more to an island off northern Michigan to examine the local flora.

The reason? Her husband, Edwin E. Leuck, is a plant specialist, and the two biology professors at Centenary College of Louisiana do most of their scholarly work together.

They have spent the past 12 summers on

ALSO SEE: Join the debate: Are colleges dealing well with the increasing number of academic couples who work in the same department? (The responses) FOR SUBSCRIBERS: More stories from this week's The Faculty section

Beaver Island in Lake Michigan, conducting studies that complement one another. For their most recent project, they first pursued his interests, observing vegetation that had taken over an abandoned beaver dam. Then they turned to hers, studying the beavers after their return. "I wouldn't have been sitting out in the middle of a beaver dam swatting mosquitoes and recording plants if we weren't married," she says.

The Leucks are part of a growing number of two-career academic couples who work not only on the same campus, but in the same discipline. Just 30 years ago, antinepotism rules prohibited such an arrangement on most campuses, where administrators, worried about conflicts of interest, typically would hire only the male half of a pair.

But as the number of women attending graduate school and earning Ph.D.'s has grown -- 16,945 women earned doctorates in 1996, compared with 2,086 in 1966 -- so has the number of academic couples. A national survey completed in academic 1989-90 found that among professors who were married, 35 per cent of the males and 40 per cent of the females reported that their spouses were also academics. Because lots of those couples met in graduate school -- hanging around music-practice rooms or gathering around seminar tables -- many are in the same discipline.

Finding places for both halves of a couple has become a major challenge in faculty recruiting. Finding two spots in the same department is particularly difficult. Most universities still have some rules to prevent conflicts of interest. On many campuses, professors are not allowed to participate in tenure proceedings for their spouses, nor are they allowed to set their spouses' salary.

Once couples do land in the same department, some go their separate ways, carving out different specialties and working independently. Others end up sharing a laboratory, sitting on the same committees, and writing papers together.

The Leucks constitute half of their small college's biology department. "Her bike is parked in my office, so I know she's

Dan Sheehan for The Chronicle Leslie L. Parrott and Les Parrott work together at Seattle Pacific U., where they direct the Center for Relationship Development

here somewhere," Mr. Leuck commented during a telephone interview.

Working in such close quarters can pose challenges. For one thing, how do couples tolerate all that togetherness? What if one partner's reputation is overshadowed by the other's? Whose name goes first on a journal article they've written? And how do they manage to have personal lives when their common interests focus on work?

There are questions for universities as well. Colleagues may view a couple as a kind of clique that can wield too much power within a department. As a humanities professor at the Johns Hopkins University observes: "People who sleep together tend to vote together."

If a couple's cohesion can be problematic, the opposite can be equally so. When a long-time academic couple breaks up, the split can put strain on a department. The university may have to rearrange the couple's shared workspace. And colleagues may feel that they have to choose sides.

Although being part of a collaborative couple has potential pitfalls, a great many partners persevere. Living with someone who shares your professional interests is ideal, they say. "We have something many scientists dream of: someone who is really engaged in the project we're doing, who we can talk to all of the time," says Diana G. Myles, a professor of molecular and cellular biology at the University of California at Davis.

She and her husband, Paul Primakoff, worked in the same department at the University of Connecticut. When they moved to Davis in 1996, she went to the biology department, and he got a job at the medical school, where he is a professor of cellular biology and human anatomy. The two still share laboratories, where they do research on human reproduction. But Ms. Myles misses the closeness of being in the same department. "If something came up, and you didn't like it or you were excited about it, you always had someone to talk to who cared. I was used to being able to walk into his office and say, 'Guess what?'"

Academic relationships work in large part because couples respect one another's talents. Their ability to take cues

Kerry Bowman, Black Star, for The Chronicle Michigan told Peggie J. Hollingsworth she had to leave the lab of her husband, Charles Smith.

from each other makes them different from other academic colleagues who collaborate.

Robert Bode and his partner, Lee Thompson, are associate professors of music at Whitman College, where Mr. Bode conducts the chorus, while Mr. Thompson accompanies the group on the piano.

"Much of what we do is on an instinctive level," says Mr. Bode. "Even before I tell the chorus what they need to work on, he's giving them the pitch for that spot."

Leslie L. Parrott knows the feeling. She's been friends with her closest colleague, her husband, Les Parrott, since 1978, when she was 14 years old and he was 17. "You can totally trust the person you're working with," she says of working with a spouse. "They know when you're in trouble and need help, and they know when it's your shining moment."

The Parrotts have extra insight into what makes couples click. They direct Seattle Pacific University's Center for Relationship Development, and Mr. Parrott is also an associate professor of psychology at the university. The Parrotts offer classes on the campus, run marriage-counseling and family-therapy sessions through the center, and have written 11 books together. (His name is also Leslie, but he goes by Les to minimize confusion.)

Couples try to be sensitive to how their closeness might affect their colleagues. Some couples make a point of sitting apart in faculty meetings and, if they disagree on professional matters, doing so publicly. They want their colleagues to know that they are independent thinkers. And they try to reserve physical affection for home. "Once in a while I make a mistake and call him 'honey,'" says Ms. Myles.

It seems hard to believe, but almost all of the two dozen academic couples The Chronicle interviewed claim that they don't argue about whose accomplishments are greater or about whose name should go first on an academic paper. (They usually take turns or go with who did more work on a particular article.) In fact, unlike couples who don't work together, those who do seem to have annoyingly placid relationships. Ask what they argue about, and you're likely to be met with silence.

Still, couples who collaborate acknowledge that spending time apart is a must. "My first wife and I shared an office," recalls Dale Hample, a professor of communications at Western Illinois

Scott Elmquist At Whitman, Robert Bode (right) and his partner, Lee Thompson, are both music professors.

University. That's something he does not recommend. "When you come home at the end of the day, you can't say, 'Honey, what happened?' You were there." His first wife no longer works at the institution, and Mr. Hample now has his own office -- three doors down from that of his second wife, Judith M. Dallinger, also a professor of communications.

A key to making their arrangements work, couples say, is splitting projects into sections that they can complete independently. Doing separate work makes each person a scholar in his or her own right.

More difficult than creating space in their work relationship, though, is drawing the line between work and home. "We have a tendency to have department meetings over the kitchen table," admits Joan Hulse Thompson, who heads the political-science department at Beaver College with her husband, Robert R. Thompson.

Edward and Barbara Lynch, both professors of marriage and family therapy, have attempted to protect their private life by living more than an hour's drive from the office they share at Southern Connecticut State University. Their home, in a peaceful, oceanfront community, is a refuge, where she makes beaded jewelry and he picks at a guitar. They would rather spend the evening doting on their two aging Lhasa apsos than polishing the book they are writing together for therapists.

Despite such precautions, working together does not always work out. Mr. Hample and Ms. Dallinger, the communications professors at Western Illinois, have completed about 25 studies together. But recently they decided to put the brakes on their professional relationship.

Their problems came to a head during a project in which they asked participants to listen to a sentence and draw an image to express it. When they began coding the responses, they found that they didn't agree on what the outcomes meant. Tempers flared, and after the two decided that they couldn't finish the project, Mr. Hample asked a student to step in and help him."The material was not passing cleanly through our marriage," he observes.

Peggie J. Hollingsworth learned the hard way that working with one's spouse is not always a good idea, at least not in the eyes of a university. She left the University of Michigan a year ago, after refusing to move from her husband's pharmacology laboratory, where she had worked for 15 years as a research scientist.

Research money in the laboratory had been running out, and university administrators had told Ms. Hollingsworth, who was not on the tenure track, that if she wanted to be considered

Neil Johnson for The Chronicle Beth E. Leuck and Edwin E. Leuck of Centenary College do most of their biology research together.

for promotion, she would have to establish professional independence from her husband, Charles B. Smith, a professor of pharmacology in the medical school. She responded that she had devoted her career to research on toxic compounds and their effect on brain chemistry, and saw no reason to move.

Ms. Hollingsworth believes that the university simply wanted to force her out after clashing with her on many issues over the years. She has sued Michigan, charging discrimination on the basis of her marital status.

Dr. Smith, her husband, says several other couples work together successfully at the medical school. The university did not like Ms. Hollingsworth, he adds, because she is black. But a spokeswoman for Michigan said: "We do not believe there has been discrimination against Dr. Hollingsworth, and we are vigorously defending the case."

A married couple in the English department at the Johns Hopkins University also has had problems, but not for lack of respect from the administration. It's their colleagues who don't like them, criticizing them for sticking together and pushing their own agenda.

The couple, Frances Ferguson and Walter Benn Michaels, are considered the nexus of an elite clique within the department. In 1994, she recommended that a friend of theirs, Steven Knapp, be hired away from the University of California at Berkeley to fill a dean's position. The president of Johns Hopkins agreed, and Mr. Knapp was named dean of arts and sciences. In October 1996, he was made provost.

Some of the couple's colleagues believe that in return for helping Mr. Knapp land the job, Ms. Ferguson and Mr. Michaels have received special favors from him. Their critics cite as an example the fact that both of them were recently named to the steering committee of Johns Hopkins's new Center for Research on Culture and Literature, after agreeing to pass up job offers from Duke University. "These people are ruthless and have an incredible amount of arrogance," says one professor, who asked to remain anonymous.

Ms. Ferguson says she and her husband have attracted attention simply because they are devoted to their work. "The fact that we're willing to do various committee jobs can look like we're engaged in a desperate power grab," she says.

After all, she says, couples are simply easy targets.

JOIN THE DEBATE