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[tenured_feminist]

Unfortunately, helpful, every academic on the planet realizes that big cities are bigger and have more universities than small cities. So in my fields, any time jobs open up in Boston, New York, LA, San Francisco, Chicago, DC, etc., they draw every couple in that field on the market.

One would think that universities in smaller cities or universities that are the only game in town would take this into account, but as aandsdean points out, usually the structure isn't there and the pockets aren't deep enough.

[southbound]

I've just quickly read through the thread, and offer these comments on the two different cases that are addressed:

1) spouses in different disciplines
Our small SLAC obviously doesn't want to lose our best candidates, and actually really wants people who work here to have good lives, and so is willing to try to find a position for a spouse (we're very isolated geographically).  But, as noted by many, new faculty lines are *extremely* hard to come by, so it is rare--vanishingly rare--to be able to offer an additional permanent position at the time of the appointment. 

Naturally, the more time we have to work with other departments, explore positions in interdisciplinary programs, etc. the better.  It wouldn't cause an applicant's file to be dismissed if--sometime between the first interview and an offer--she were to ask about the possibilities of a spousal position. 

A person could frame the question so it didn't sound like a deal-breaker (even if it was).  Just find out whether the place makes or is willing to try and make such accommodations, without communicating the presumption that your candidacy is one that would warrant extraordinary efforts, and without tipping your hand about how much the answer will affect your interest in the position.  You can figure out when you need to tell them that.

But I'm really interested in the comments on the other kind of case.

2) both spouses in the same discipline
I may have missed it, but most discussion of this seemed to focus on finding two positions in the department.  Aside from the rarity of this, others have pointed to the odds of the two connected people being at the top of two different lists of two specializations, and so forth.

Has anyone mentioned joint appointments?  We have done these with great success in several departments on our campus.  Of course two people with one job means two people with one paycheck, but that can be workable at midwest SLAC in ways that it might not be elsewhere.  But if it is financially workable, a 3/3 teaching load becomes 2/1 and 1/2 for two teacher-scholars.  Departments benefit--especially at a small place like ours, where departments might have just 3 or 4 faculty positions--or less.  Having 2 anthropology lines but 3 anthropologists strengthens and broadens that program, and benefits students, faculty, and an academic couple. 

And in practice, departments are often able to say to the dean "say, in order to allow X to teach in an interdisciplinary program/cover a temporary reduction for Y/provide that course you've been pushing for, let's give academic couple 1 or 2 more courses next year."   Academic couple gets a bigger paycheck to split and fewer of our courses are taught by adjuncts (not that there are many adjuncts about in the wilds of midwest SLAC).

All this to say that departments should, in my view, encourage joint applications even when you have only one position to fill, and appropriately situated academic couples should ask about them, if you think you could get by with "one" job--well two pretty good jobs with one paycheck.   Leave it to another thread to talk about the delicacy of getting a joint contract that's fair to everybody, etc.

[sibyl]

I was just pointing out that sometimes in the case of large cities, the solution is beyond a one school solution and should be expanded to include looking for possibilities at other schools in the area.

Actually, there are several "regional" consortia that have been formed specifically to assist with the two-body problem, and almost all of them exist outside major cities.  I'm thinking of the Bay Area HERC, for example, or the "Twelve Colleges" group (I don't think that's the right name) in Western New England, which exist as a way of helping seekers find jobs for family members at nearby institutions.  The HR websites at Bowdoin, Bates, and Colby link to each other for the same reason. 

So it's not that the strategies for addressing the two-body problem are complicated.  The difficulty is that any solution is handicapped because it can't address the core structural problem, which is that there are fewer jobs than jobseekers.