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[Another anon]

"I think that most Americans, even professionals, expect to get a job that allows them to live in the same city as their spouse. Why is that “wanting it all”? And why is that a bad thing? "

But they do not expect the company that hires them to also hire their spouse. They consider finding work their responsibility, not their employer's. Why is that so hard to understand?

You will not strengthen your case by making faulty analogies to the world outside of academia. Most Americans make the accomodations and sacrifices necessary to have a family and a career. Before one spouse accepts a position in a new city, they consider whether the other spouse can find adequate employment, if that is desired. Sometimes that means that the trailing spouse takes a job in a different field or one for which he or she is overqualified. They do the non-academic equivalent of what you have done, in other words.

Most Americans also deal with parenthood issues, elder care issues, etc., and most of them work 40 hours a week at the workplace. They cannot schedule their in-office hours around their personal needs, or request that departmental meetings be held at hours that don't conflict with their family commitments. Many of them do not have health insurance or sick leave or any of the other benefits that academics take for granted. None of them have tenure. There are plenty of problems with our social and economic system, for everyone, not just trailing academic spouses.

The mission of the college or university is to educate, not to provide jobs for trailing spouses. Not only are you asking that institutions create positions simply to provide employment for trailing spouses, you are also asking that open positions be given to trailing spouses, rather than to the most qualified candidates.

Tamiam makes a much better case by pointing out that many colleges and universities are located in small towns where the college or university may be the major employer, and so it may be to the institution's advantage to provide for trailing spouses in some cases. However, that means that positions that might have gone to more qualified candidates will be given to trailing spouses. How equitable is it to give preferential treatment to people who happen to be married to academics? Where are qualified candidates who are not trailing spouses supposed to find positions?

Your suggested solutions might be possible at CCs and SLACs, but they certainly wouldn't be viable at research institutions. And even CCs and SLACs would have to face the problem of discrimination on the basis of marriage, and possibly hiring marginally qualified individuals.

How is "part-time" different from adjunct? Do you mean permanent part-time? Would that include benefits or not? Would they be reserved for trailing spouses? Would you do away with all adjuncts, or would those not married to academics still be relegated to the adjunct pile? Not all adjuncts are trailing spouses, and most of them would grab permanent part-time positions if offered.

Or do you mean part-time tenure track? How would one define a "part-time tt job?" What would you drop? Teaching, research, or service? Or would part-timers have 10-14 years to earn tenure? Or would they only have to meet half of the requirements?

How would one "share" a tenure-track position, when it involves research as well as teaching? How would tenure be decided in this case?

How would schools fill all of the courses created by these new part-time positions? Or are you suggesting turning full-time slots into 2 part-time slots? At what point does this stop?

Would these part-time people have committee responsibilities? If not, how would the department conduct its affairs?  

Would they be required to do any research at all? If not, then who would do the research in the field? Or would the part-time do all of the teaching and the full-time all of the research?

[realist]

OK, I am totally symapthetic to the needs of those who need to care for a sick child or an elderly relative, etc., and those issues are usually covered by a family leave policy of some kind.

I am not, however, as sympathetic to the "two-body problem."

No one owes your spouse a job.

Everyone makes choices in life, and at some point you will have to choose whether to have a commuter marriage or whether one of you will have to make some career changes in order for both of you to live together.

The idea that your career "prevents" you from living in the same city as your spouse is ridiculous.

Instead, you have goals as a couple which are not compatible with most jobs.

That's different.

No one gave you a life sentence to academia.  You can leave if you want.  Anytime.

And academia is not hostile to marriage.

No other profession takes your choice to pair-bond or not pair-bond into consideration and no other profession agrees to hire your spouse so you can have exactly the life you want.

Academia is FAR more hostile to female single parents that it is to married people with or without children.  But, then, so is EVERY profession.

The two-body problem is NOT really a two-body problem.

It is a two-ambitious-careers-in-the-same-field problem.  And the geographic dispersion of jobs in academia is just a reality.  It is not a conspiracy against your personal happiness.  It is how the business (and, yes, it is a business) must operate.  It exists to deliver a product in locations where its consumers need it, NOT to set up extra points of delivery where its employees need them NOR to discriminate against other job applicants in favor of someone who shares a bed with a current employee or hot recruit.

I realize it's not fun to be an academic couple on the market, but it's not a problem for your employer to solve.  It's something you will have to do as a couple, just like every other two-career couple in the world.

[hummbug]

Realist makes many good points.  But colleges and universities do compete for the best hires, not just any hires, despite the overabundance of Ph.Ds.  

At my school, there is some animosity toward family health benefits.  Some childless and single family members argue that there should be a set amount of money for each faculty member that the college allocates towards health care regardless of family status.  Currently, since the college matches a portion of the health care plan, the college spends more on a faculty member with a family.

My argument is that this is a competitive benefit.  If the college did not do this, faculty with families would leave for colleges offering family plans.  Since many faculty have families, this is one way to ensure that the college gets excellent faculty members.  Couldn't this rationale also be used for spousal hires?  Perhaps my small school in the middle of Southern nowhere should take out an ad seeking dual hires for various combinations of our open positions?  Could we use this as a competitive benefit to get faculty members with stronger pedigrees than usual?  Or would the OP consider that as settling for something less than optimum?

[kajey]

I'm surprised no one has tried to clarify this before.  By real part time work, I think we mean, work that pays 1/3 to 1/2 of a fulltime salary for half of the work expected for a full-time salary.  

My trailing spouse and I would be thrilled with that arrangement.  I, on the full-time TT, would earn a full-salary and maintain health and other benefits for the family. S/he would then teach and advise half the courses/students as I do, and make 1/3 to 1/2 of the money I do, without benefits, since I have them. S/he would not ever gain tenure, but could have the stability of yearly or perhaps mult-year part-time contracts.  The University gains a stable, happy faculty by treating part-timers that way, whether they are attached to a tenured spouse or not.

Does anyone know of any place that pays any part-time instructor 1/3 to 1/2 of what full-time instructors earn?  I don't.  The typical pay seems to be $1,000 per credit hour, and part time instructors typically don't know if they'll be hired from semester to semester, let alone year to year.  The universities do this because they can--it is a buyer's market and they can treat part-timers (adjuncts) as disposable.  But just because they can doesn't mean they should.  And they would probably benefit more from the stability than the few thousand extra bucks per year would cost them.  

My university will be facing another search in my department next year for this reason.  My spouse can't find anything but sporadic adjuncting work in our area.  It's too expensive to live here on my salary alone, but the instability of his situation is driving us nuts, so I'm going on the market in cheaper hoursing markets so we can (we hope) live on my salary alone and if he finds work, then fine, if not, also fine.  That's the choice that universities are making when they choose what they can do rather than what they should do.

[%sig%]

[acadmom]

Yes, Mason and Goulden's studies and publications are definitely worth mining for alternatives. Also check out the Sloan Foundation website--they've been working on this issue for years, inside and outside the academia, and Kathleen Christensen has a white paper posted there on the "dual ladder program." Another resource to look into is the AACU's online articles in On Campus With Women.

I also agree with the point that institutional policies and practices will shape the profile of the future cohort of professors, and brilliant, talented female teachers and scholars are finding industry much more family-friendly. It is in the interest of universities and colleges to keep them in academia.

[Yet Another Anon]

I'm struck by several things in reading this thread:

1) This topic raises a lot of passion on both sides of the question. As I read it, the OP is trying to get us talking about the system--who it favors, who it doesn't, what sorts of changes we might make to solve a statistically demonstrable problem. This is something academics ought to be good at. Some of the posts are responding in this spirit, once again on both sides of the question, but I also see a very strong tendency among posters to personalize the issue. If you're talking about a system, what's the point of calling the OP selfish, unrealistic, naive, or any of the other insults appearing in the posts above? Character assassination is unlikely to get us very far.

2) I see a very strong trend, especially in the more negative posts, to cast this as an *individual* problem rather than a systemic one. We all like to believe that we got where we are, in a very competitive profession, based on our personal merits. And we're all meritorious, in our various Type A personality ways, so we have plenty of evidence to back up our inclinations toward this conclusion. But if we remove our own brilliant achievements from consideration and just look dispassionately at the system, it doesn't take very long to conclude that academia is riddled with structural inequalities, and that it takes equal parts ability and dumb luck to gain access to the resources (financial, institutional, and other) that we need to transform striving and ability into actual achievement.

3) It's remarkable that no one has yet mentioned tenure itself as part of the larger problem OP is asking about. For those who insist on casting this discussion in purely personal, merit-based terms, ask this: How do the tenure cases from 15 or 20 years ago compare to those of our colleagues who just received tenure? How many of those who received tenure 15 years ago would be comfortable putting their records of achievement from the last 5 years up against those of our junior colleagues coming up for tenure? Based strictly on merit, who has done the most recently to earn a spot on the faculty? Perhaps you clear this bar, and perhaps not--but if you look at the overall system, it's abundantly clear that many tenured folks would lose this sort of contest.

Given that OP turned down a prestigious postdoc to be a trailing spouse, I think we can assume OP's credentials are good, and that lecturing OP on having to make hard choices as part of family life are unnecessary. The real question is not going to be answered by insulting OP's motives or credentials. It is only going to be answered by asking what reasons we have for preferring a system with two dramatically inequitable tiers--tt and adjunct--to alternative structures that would capitalize on the abilities of well-qualified, talented, motivated people who nevertheless have good reasons for wanting something other than the high-powered tt grind or an adjunt's table scraps.

[%sig%]

[Phil]

To Kajey,

As I understand it, because your university is unwilling to pay your spouse 1/2 or 1/3 of what you make, you plan to leave.  How many thousands of dollars more would your university have to spend to keep you, over what it would cost to replace you?  I'm in the humanities, which means that I work cheap.  If your salary is comparable to mine, the arrangement that you'd like to see the university make might cost them an extra $12,000-$13,000 a year.  (I'm figuring that your spouse would make $25K a year, versus $12,000 for 12 hours of adjunct teaching.)  If you make more than I do, your proposal would only cost them more.  You must be very good, if you are worth that much more than the person that they could hire to replace you.  If you are really worth $13K more than the next person, maybe the way to approach your situation is not to ask for more money for your spouse, but to try to negotiate a higher salary for yourself.  Find another school willing to pay you that extra $13K, then look for a counteroffer.  That way, your current situation would be more affordable.

Also, at least at my school, I don't think we could offer a position like that to your spouse with a competitive search.  I don't think the EO office would allow it.  I may be wrong, though.

[another spouse trailer]

What's something in between tt and pt adjunct? I think my position is an example.   It's a full time faculty position with benefits.  The catch?  I have a multi-year contract instead of tenure.  For me, it's a good trade off-I get to live in the same house as my spouse and get to stay in academia.

I do know a few people who do have pt tt postitions, but they are few and far between.

[%sig%]

[anon]

Kajey asks : "Does anyone know of any place that pays any part-time instructor 1/3 to 1/2 of what full-time instructors earn?"

UCLA does, and I assume the rest to the UC system. As an adjunct, I am paid just under $6,000 for a 3-credit graduate course -- per quarter. However, that's without benefits and without any guarantee of future employment.

Not all adjunct faculty are trailing spouses. Not all adjunct faculty have a sopuse with a job that includes benefits, if they have a spouse at all. So this utopia you envision peopled with adjuncts who have now become permanent part-time non-tenured faculty without benefits would do nothing to address the real inequities between those who are on the tenure track and those who are not.

However, the issue of whether tenure should be changed is only tangentially related to the dual-academic-couple issue. Even if tenure were abolished or some other system instituted, there would not be any guarantee that a dual-academic-couple could be accomodated.

As for name-calling, the OP started it.

What I'd like to know is why the OP didn't apply to the department of interest herself. Why expect the provost to do it? Most of us want a job, we apply for it.

And contrary to Acadmom's assumption, not all female faculty members are married with children.

[L.]

I disagree strongly with those who have said that academia is 'supportive' of spouses.  A field which expects people to work 12 hours a day and relocate at least once in their careers to a randomly chosen place is not supportive of any kind of personal life.  

In fact, I would venture to guess that this lack of supportiveness is the root of the hostility OP notices in the forums.  This is an area within which just about everyone feels under attack in some way, so people will lash out.  For example, someone such as I was for several years who had no spouse or prospect of one because of my long hours might resent your expectation that *your* personal needs should be met when I could not even imagine the kind of change that would meet *my* needs.

Academia is a brutal kind of life, as far as I can see.  To be both happy and successful in academia one would have to be both lucky and willing to make sacrifices--even if one were a man with a traditional-ish wife who was willing to put her career second to his and to accept his inability to devote time to the family.  If one is not in that position then it seems most likely that one will have to choose between having a meaningful family life and having the career one has imagined and trained for.  The particular shape that this choice takes differs a lot, but nevertheless the choice presents itself.  It is painful for all of us, so we should try to see the similarities in our positions rather than attacking one another.

Can the situation change?  Short answer, no.  Each problem is different, so even addressing one of them (such as the 'two body problem') would only be a drop in the bucket.  And anyway, adddressing any of these problems would require the kind of money and respect that are not likely to be directed at academics.

[Anon For Now]

This is a topic on which I feel very torn. When I was on the market, my wife (MFA) was the trailing spouse. When I took my first position, she was adjuncting full-time for $10k/year (15 credit hours/semester)-it was insane. She was literally paid $325/credit hour. When we started looking again, we agreed that her status should be a major part of the negotiations. At my currrent instutition, she received a full-time instructor's position that fits her skills and training perfectly. Had I not been forceful about it, I do not know if her current department could have found the funds to hire her, but they love having her and she fills a niche for them that they could not fill in the past.
 
THAT SAID, my department just got "stuck" with the trailing spouse for our new provost. The provost is wonderful, but her husband is deadwood--hasn't published in over a decade, doesn't really like teaching, he duplicates a lot of the ground already covered in the department (although not as well as the people already here), and sucks the intellectual vigor out of any conversation by referring to theories that have been dead for twenty years. Part of our provost's package was a tenured professorship for her husband, and we were the "lucky" recipient of this deal. The only upside any of us can see so far is that our dean feels really badly for us and made it clear that he will look favorably on requests for new computers, travel $$, etc.

So, what does this mean to me? We ALL want to think our spouses are above-average, high performing at whatever they do, but some of them obivously cannot be (unless the academy has suddenly transformed into Lake Woebegon). We must recognize that not ALL trailing spouses are qualified, a good fit, etc. for academic positions.

In addition, we as the non-trailing (leading?) spouses must be willing to make the tough choices both for ourselves and for our careers as well. I turned down a more prestigious position to take the one I am in specifically because of the promise of full-time employment for my spouse. We cannot expect the trailing spouses to address this issue--they are in a far weaker bargaining position than we are.

At the same time, schools like mine (no major metro area in commuting distance) must find ways to help employ trailing spouses, whether on campus or off--that is just good business and good HR practice. Failure to do so will only encourage faculty departures and depress faculty morale.

Finally, we as faculty can put pressure on our administrations to make greater efforts to address trailing spouse issues. My grad alma mater has a full-time position ("Relocation Specialist" is his title, I think) dedicated to assisting trailing spouses find academic or non-academic work in the community. If every university were to officially task someone to this issue, my guess is it would reduce turnover and improve morale.

[%sig%]

[Anon by any other name]

What I fail to see is how any of this -- eliminating tenure, turning adjunct positions into permanent part-time or full-time positions, tenured or not --  would solve the problem.  The only way to guarantee that a spouse will be hired is one of the following "solutions:"

1. Create new positions on demand, regardless of the needs of the department or institution, or the funds for the salary. In some cases, it might be necessary to create an entirely new department.

2. Reserve certain types of positions in every department for spousal hires only; this might involve using adjunct until a candidate with a spouse with the right qualifications is hired, or not offering certain courses.

3. Fire current non-tenured faculty when necessary in order to give that position to a spouse. Those faculty should have thought of these issues when they married that non-academic.

4. Give any open position on campus to the spouse, regardless of the fit.

Need I point out the problems with these?

To Yet Another Anon -- however I got my position, it certainly wasn't because I was married to a tenure-track hire.

[Trailing Spouse by choice]

I’m really glad to see these issues seriously discussed. I don’t think anything can change without discussion and serious reflection.

I also want to point out that I didn’t intend this discuss to be limited to the two body problem but to be a more general reflection on the difficulty of balancing personal life with academic life. Clearly the two body problem isn’t the only personal problem that academics face. There is also parenthood, elder care, illness, social networks & dating –which affect both married and single people. Because each situation is so different, I don’t think there is just one answer. I certainly don’t think that there should be an automatic solution as hinted at in some of the replies above – no spousal hire or request to go to part-time status or whatever should be automatic (as illustrated by Anon for Now’s post). Clearly each institution and individual needs to work out a solution that fits each situation.  But I am suggesting that having more flexibility in the system and options beyond full-time tt and adjunct positions would allow for more creative solutions in each particular case.

As you can probably tell from my earlier posts, I’ve been doing a bit of reading on this subject, and I’ve been surprised by the research on personal life & academia in two ways.

First, I didn’t know that all of the options that have been suggested and dismissed on this forum have and are being successfully used at various institutions around the country. Part-time tt, part-time & full time renewable positions (with better pay than adjuncts and which give both the institution and the academic more stability), job sharing and split positions, shared advertising of positions, relocation services for spouses & partners (which most business have), on site daycare, paternity leave etc are all policies that some institutions have successfully implemented. Furthermore, research from business shows that having flexible options lowers turnover, increases morale and productivity, and of course increases profits. I think that academia could also benefit from some flexibility in the system.

Second, I didn’t realize that the career-or-family choice was really a choice that women have to make disproportionately. There are of course, men who have sacrificed their careers for family (I personally know a couple). However, the statistics show that male academics disproportionately can and do have both families and careers but women don’t. The following stats come from Mary Ann Mason & Marc Goulden “Do Babies Matter (Part II)?” from Academe Nov 2004. Women who have babies early in their career get tenure 56% of the time but men who have babies early get tenure 77% of the time. 44% of women with tenure have kids while 70% of men with tenure have kids. Women with tenure are more likely than men to have had fewer children than they wanted. Women on the tt are twice as likely as women in adjunct positions to get divorced and 50% more likely to get divorced as compared to men on the tt. As the authors say “Women, it seems, cannot have it all – tenure and a family – while men can.”

Finally, I would like to say that it’s really hurtful to read posts that say that “I want it all” and that I just have to make sacrifices. I’ve already sacrificed the high powered career by choosing adjunct positions over the prestigious post-doc. The post-doc could have led to a good tt position, but it’s unlikely that an adjunct position will do the same. It was a very painful decision to make. Ultimately, I had to choose between the career I’d worked so hard for or the spouse I had looked so long to find. And I would like to say that I am considering career options outside of academia. I know what the reality of the situation is. I just think that we don’t have to accept that the system will always be this way. And nothing will change if the people within the system don’t do something.


Would anyone like a short bibliography on the topic?  I could post a list of what I've been reading.

[Utterly confused]

If you don't want it all, then what is the purpose of your post? Why should the system change, if not so that you and a few others like you can have it all? You have yet to demonstrate that such changes would benefit anyone except trailing spouses.

Life is full of challenges and sacrifices and compromises, and nothing is ever going to change that.  ALL people deal with issues involved in balancing work and life, such as parenthood, elder care, illness, social networks, dating, two-career couples, etc. And many have to try to do that while working for minimum-wage with no health insurance; it's the best they can do with only a high school education. Many of them are single mothers who are not receiving court-awarded child support.

Perhaps you didn't realize that, just as you didn't "realize that the career-or-family choice was really a choice that women have to make disproportionately." I didn't realize that anyone didn't realize that basic fact.

"Most businesses" do not have relocation services. Most businesses are small businesses with only local branches, if any. They have no need for relocation services. And that isn't a service offered by WalMart or MacDonald's. The only "relocation services" many companies are offering today is relocation to other countries; it's called "outsourcing." It solves the dual-career problem, that's for sure. Neither one of them has a job.

I have to wonder exactly what kind of life you've been living, that you are so unaware of the realities of the lives of the majority of people. It certainly explains why you are so convinced that your life is not better than the average American's, simply because you don't have everything exactly the way you want it.

Why do you persistently refuse to address the posts in response to yours? Questions have been raised, but your response evades them, offering instead a repetition of your previous post. It appears that you are not interested in asking a question and discussing the responses, but in presenting a lecture on a couple of books you're currently reading and enlightening the rest of us. Maybe you need to do a more thorough literature review and examine the issue from all sides?

This is a general societal problem. It has its roots in the Industrial Era and the rise of the middle-class in Victorian England, as well as in our own country's Puritan/Calivinist and capitalist culture. It is complicated and complex and won't be solved by reading a couple of biased popular works that offer facile and simplistic solutions to your particular problem.

[Why???]

One question and one observation:

Do couples, especially couples who marry in graduate school, despite almost 20 years of doomsaying about jobs in academia, really expect dual/equal careers?  My partner and I have struggled with this for over a decade, but we certainly can't say we went into it with ignorance:  when we were married, we were both getting Ph.D.s in English, a field with a dramatically declining job pool.  While we would have liked to have had equal/dual careers, we were fooling ourselves to think that all of the biggest/richest schools could afford to hire both of us (and if they could have, we would have thought of it as outstanding luck, not something we deserved).  When I got my first job, my partner was hired with promises of "all the adjunt work you can handle."  It lasted one semester.  What does one do, with the move not paid off, student loans coming due, children needing some daycare?

Jump ahead 15 years:  I've recently been hired as an associate provost at an R1.  My partner was given a "spousal accomidation" in a department that loathes him and loathes the fact that I have some say over their budget and T & P decisions (meaning they can be mean, but not too mean).  Frankly, the way they've treated him is not something I would wish upon my worst enemy (and I've made a few over the years).

Moral of the story:  spousal hires, perhaps in the humanities more than the sciences, look much better on paper than they do in real life...because you can legislate spousal hiring but you'll never be able to legislate kindness....