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[kimwilliamsg]

Hi All--

As is so often the case, both my husband and I are academics (like we have time to meet people on the outside, right?)  I finished my Ph.D. in 2003, and after a little floundering I made a bit of a field switch (from biological anthropology to ecology) and am now finishing the first year of a 2-3 year postdoc, doing an amazing project on big grant that I was PI on.  So, after a while of lackluster performance, I feel like I'm finally coming into my own, and will be very marketable once I'm done with my current postdoc.  I'll be applying for some tenure-track positions this  year, although to be honest, I'd rather do a third year of the posdoc and have a that much more time for pure research and writing up.

My husband will be finishing his Ph.D. this year in Cinema Studies, in a subfield that is currently hot.  His chances of landing a tenure-track job this year seem very high (probably higher than mine), and there is at least one position that seems tailor made for him.

Given that one of us might hit the jackpot this year, we may soon be faced with the dreaded question of what to do with that spouse.  We're obviously interested in universities with some sort of program for spousal appointments, but how common are these?  What, realistically, is the potential for a spousal hire?  (We do realize this will vary with the institution?)  When in the process should we ask about this, and are appointments for spouses usually in fairly dead-end tracks?  Will being in different fields be a help, or of no importance?

If you have a story to share, well, get it out there!

Cheers
Kim

[winterbourne]

Kim,
This is an extremely tough situation to be in, and not one with any easy answers.  If past threads on this topic are any indication, you are going to get a flood of pessimistic responses saying "it will never happen."  For that reason, I'd like to point out that I personally know of four junior-professor dual-hire couples - three from surrounding cohorts in my graduate program, one is an old friend from college.  In two of those cases, both partners now have TT jobs at the same institution; in the two others, one is TT and the other is aduncting.  Only in one of those cases are both partners in the same program.
So anybody who tries to tell you that it can't be done has given up hope prematurely.  Giving specific advice on how to approach this is a different matter.  The fact that both of you seem to be working in "hot" fields will certainly help.  In all the cases that I know about, the couples waited until one partner had gotten an offer, and then politely but firmly impressed upon the committee that spousal employment was of major importance for them.  At that point, after all, it can't hurt to ask.
Another option to consider is a non-academic job at the university for one of you guys.  Positions as assistant deans or in the library are usually easier to come by than full-time faculty positions. Some of these may require specialized degrees for promotion (such as an MLS), and they may seem like "dead-end jobs" at first, but you may discover that they are quite satisfying in their own right.

Good luck!

[ubenglish]

Kim --

My spouse and I just went through this whole process from top to bottom, and it paid off wonderfully: we are now both on the tenure-track at a school where we are very happy. 

The whole effort was long, complicated, trying, exhausting, with all sorts of ups and downs.  I won't go into the whole thing, but here are the main lessons we learned.

1. Be very clear as to what your shared goal is.  For us, it was two-tenure track jobs in the same city.  After some difficult discussions thrashing it out, that became the holy grail and everything we did was oriented toward achieving it. 

2. Be patient, and persevere.  Good things in academia don't come quickly.  It took us two years of living apart (separated by a year together) before we broke through.  But we are glad we didn't throw in the towel out of frustration or impatience.  Don't expect any real movement to accompany the first offer (like, "Oh, of course we'll hire your spouse on the tenure-track.")  The response will probably be, "We can probably get them some teaching."  Don't go for it (see #3). 

3. Don't compromise.  It would have been easy for one or the other of us to accept a position non-commensurate with our abilities and achievements (i.e., something off the tenure-track), but we felt this would have been too risky professionally.  Once we both got T-T jobs, albeit in different states, our bargaining power went way up, both because there was no question we had the goods, and because each school was afraid of losing its new hire to the other.

4. Take notice of the local economy.  The school where we ended up is in a location that has a lot of growth, both economically and in terms of population.  The school left behind is in a location that is stagnating.  This became an important factor in our strategy. 

5. Play it cool.  In the midst of the frustration, doubt, anger, impatience, and despair, try not to antagonize anyone by letting it show through or affect your relations with current or potential colleagues.  Hard, yes, but necessary.  Staying calm and collected will communicate professionalism and collegiality. 

6. Publish.  Spousal hires will be more likely to happen if the department knows it is not compromising its standards.  The issue of merit needs to be fully resolved, and we all know that merit is best communicated through a strong publication record. 

Well, I think that's about the core of it.  Hang in there, and remember that spousal hires do happen, and that they're actually becoming more common as schools come to recognize the realities of dual-career academic couples. 

Good luck!

javahound

[chigagolake]

Do you have the third year as a postdoc as an option?

The reason I am asking is that my partner and I were able to get a spousal hire when one of us "went first." For example, he took an extra year of PhD funding (because he could, whereas my funding was up), waited until I found a job, and then we negotiated from there. We did end up at the same place.

[canadia]

I haven't read this, but when I was looking into this last year, many recommended the book: The Two-Body Problem: Dual-Career-Couple Hiring Practices in Higher Education (Johns Hopkins, 2003).

Old articles...
http://chronicle.com/jobs/2004/09/2004092201c.htm
 
http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2005/08/2005080101c/careers.html
 
http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2005/05/2005050501c/careers.html

I hope this helps!!

[drothar]

The trailing spouse should get an offer in writing before the lucky spouse signs anything.     Verbal assurance  to "get you some teaching"  mean "we'll keep your name in mind for the adjunct pool if we have a need". Adjuncts are hired at-need, and if the need changes, you will get dropped from the schedule.

[canadia]

Thread-jack here... or a piggy-back ride to be more precise...

Like I said earlier, I looked into this last year, and from what I remember the responses and suggestions were all over the map on the following issue:

A certain SLAC is looking for 2 positions in the same dept. and both correspond to our separate subfields. The school is not very prestigious, and it isn't in the most desirable locations either.

We were planning on applying as a couple, b/c we wouldn't consider going there alone.

It seems like the committee is the same for both positions, and our common address would give us away otherwise.

Opinions?

[tenured_feminist]

Definitely look at past threads -- there have been a lot. Bottom line is that you have bargaining power only when someone really, really wants at least one of you, and even then, it's often not much given the organization of academic institutions. A few places like Wisconsin will actually cough up half a line for an acceptable partner if a department hires someone, but that's definitely not the norm.

Quisqueya, I'd say the answer depends upon where you are in your career. If you're starting out, you should assume that, unless the search is in an extremely understaffed field, that a non-prestigious SLAC in an undesireable location searching in the humanities will only get about 150 apps for each job. In the social sciences, the competition may be less stiff, like only 50-100. Do not let the first hint of the attitude you display here leak into your letters.

If one or both of you are advanced assistants or associates, it may be worth revealing your dual status. If you're both grad students, don't do it, as it won't really do you much good. In either case, though, the time to negotiate is when the offer is in hand.

I've had good success in mentioning my partner situation in cover letters but only while on the market as a very advanced assistant or an associate, and lots of people advised me not to mention it then. I just figured that there was no point in putting everyone through the whole interview and offer process if it turned out that they didn't do anything for partners, since my partner was the whole reason I was on the market in the first place. Anyway, I did it twice, extracted a good enough counter to stay the first time and moved the second.

[ursula]

The trailing spouse should get an offer in writing before the lucky spouse signs anything.     Verbal assurance  to "get you some teaching"  mean "we'll keep your name in mind for the adjunct pool if we have a need". Adjuncts are hired at-need, and if the need changes, you will get dropped from the schedule.

This is absolutely correct:  we made the mistake of believing the chair and dean who hired me when they said that the spousal unit would definitely be given something permanent.  Still hasn't happened . . .

[smurfette]

Kim- I think we're in similar fields of study. In my opinion, spouse or no spouse, your postdoc (on which you are a PI) sounds like an amazing opportunity and you should not leave it prematurely. The only way I would leave a postdoc on which I was PI is for a tenure-track job that I really wanted. I would not leave it for another post-doc (unless even better than this one) nor for adjuncting nor for a VAP.   I know you don't want to hear this, but if you're spouse gets a t-t job this year, my advice would be to finish your postdoc and do long-distance for those remaining 2 years. Then you'll be in a much better position to get a job near him.  PM me if you want to chat more...

[hamed]

As several others have said before .... make sure you wait till one of you gets an offer before you raise this issue. Several institutions are waking up the fact that many good candidates are married to other academics and that they will loose their chance of hiring them if they don't do something about spousal hires. BUT, that being said, the reality is that many places have complicated internal politics that might not let them pursue this to the fullest extent

for example .... in one school I interviewed at, I was bluntly told that they already have an associate professor whose spouse they couldn't hire into a tenure-track position (still adjucting and lecturing in the uni and other nearby schools) so there is no chance that they will entertain the idea of a new hire getting that deal. And let's not forget, search committee members and others that vote on the decision are humans and if you raise the issue about a TT position for your spouse prematurely (esp in the beginning when they are looking at 200+ applicants), that might very well affect their decision (why bother with someone with a complication when you have a field full of choices?)

[crjuprofsteve]

Wow, this is a tough issue.  I've read about some universities that aggressively try to accommodate academic couples, but they are the exception and are generally super-R1 types with the revenues to do it.

So, at risk of disclosing identifiable information about myself (not that it's anything secret), my partner and I (we're a same-sex couple) are both senior faculty in the same academic discipline.  Our areas of specialization are different, though.

We're both committed to remaining at teaching-oriented institutions.  Also, we both have (in my humble opinion) impressive vitas for teaching-oriented faculty, in that we have numerous publications and other professional development activities, a strong teaching record, a strong record of university service, etc.  I mention this only to indicate that, in the stories I'm going to relate below, neither of us is viewed as an "undesirable" tag-along candidate.

My partner applied for some department chair positions a while back.  He was offered both that he applied for.  At school #1, he waited to raise the issue of spousal accommodation until the offer had been made, thinking that doing so earlier would have raised a "red flag" and made the search committee view him more hesitantly.  The dean was quite accommodating (this was a 4-4 teaching institution), in that she "found" a 3/4-time position that I could have occupied.  This was no small task, and she was definitely willing to work to locate a spousal accommodation position.  While it was 3/4-time in terms of salary, it came with full benefits, so it wasn't a bad deal.  In talking about it, we decided it wasn't the "right" offer...only to find out that two weeks or so after he turned it down, a faculty member unexpectedly quit, opening up what would have been a position that I could fill, in terms of both availability and teaching area.  Go figure.

School #2 was a bit more bizarre.  When they initially offered my partner the job, they did not have a position for me (this was a small institution and a very small department).  So, he turned it down.  But apparently, the search must have failed after that, because not too much later, my partner and I received a conference call from the search committee chair, who told us he'd talked to the provost, and had an idea.  My partner would go in as chair, and I'd go in as a faculty member in another, totally unrelated, department, and would transfer over to my actual department later.  There's a bit more to it than that, but if I get more specific I'd get into naming names.  While the proposal was not totally outlandish, and did make some sense, it still did not feel right, and it felt like there was the potential for the academic politics of it to become difficult.  We were both flattered that they were willing to look for ways to make it work, but it, again, didn't seem like the right move.

Fortunately, we're tenured and happy where we are.  It's a difficult situation, though, if you're thinking about doing this kind of search.  I do know folks who have maintained long-distance relationships because suitable positions were not available in the same school or general region. 

I will say that I disagree TOTALLY with the article that appeared in the Chronicle "Careers" section not too long ago, which argued that academic couples could be undesirable for a department (fortunately, a subsequent article rebutted much of the first).

Anyway, good luck with your search - just thought I'd share my experiences.  The fact that you're in different disciplines may make the process easier for you.