next »

[achilles]

Hi everyone,

I have a question for those of you who managed to solve the two-body problem after a new TT line was created for you. Did you later experience any resentment or face difficulties because of the way you were hired? I'm hopeful that my SO and I will finally solve our two-body problem this year, but I am wondering if finding success could actually create other problems down the road (e.g. with colleagues, reappointment, department life, etc).

The same question could be posed to colleagues of TT spousal hires. Let's assume the hires were well qualified for the position as both researchers and teachers. Have you seen problems arise simply because of the way they were appointed?

Obviously, my SO and I are hoping for meaningful employment together no matter what. But I'm curious if there could be some problems because of the process by which we would be hired.

[svenc]

Worry about achieving the solution before you get hung up on the potential downside of it!

My department has both originated and received spousal hires, and I have seen no resentment on either side in any of these cases.  Of course, it helps that at my university, the receiving department (i.e., the dept. that gets the trailing spouse) gets a whole body at a bargain fraction of the normal cost.

That being said, my department has also turned down trailing spouse offers who seemed to be poor fits for us, even despite the bargain-basement cost of appointment. 

So I guess the take-home message from my experience is that there does not need to be problems if the spousal hire is both qualified and properly vetted before the appointment.

[msparticularity]

So I guess the take-home message from my experience is that there does not need to be problems if the spousal hire is both qualified and properly vetted before the appointment.

I saw this happen in two departments I have been associated with. As a caveat, I was a bystander (a grad student in one case and a lecturer in the other) and involved in the hiring decisions, but I was in a position to hear a lot of griping.

The problem in both cases was that while the person was perfectly qualified in the field generally, he (and it was a male both times) was not actually a good fit for the department's needs in terms of specialization. The real ill-will came because the creation of a tenured position for the person in question was then considered (by the administration) to have met the department's need for another TT person--and yet they still had no one to teach and advise grad students in the much-needed area.

One of these individuals did, in time, develop a reasonably good relationship with his department. He did this by cheerfully taking on a lot of service and administrative jobs--he taught numerous service courses, took over as chair after a few years, served on all kinds of thankless committees, and so on. Notably, though, these were only possible because he was already tenured; this kind of strategy would destroy the career of someone who needed to earn tenure.

[sibyl]

I have heard a great deal of sniping of the he-only-got-hired-because-of-her type.  It is inevitable and you should prepare for that.  Anyone who is opposed to you (either of you) on any grounds will invariably bring that up, until tenure and sometimes afterwards.

Sometimes this resentment is aimed at the sharers for other reasons.  The resentful really hate the dean for not acceding to their own two-body request, or hate their colleagues for voting for the sharer (who teaches basketweaving) rather than their own candidate (who teaches fiber arts), or something like that, but it's easier and safer to transfer that hostility to the sharers.

The reality is that resentment only needs a vehicle, not a justification.  Pulitzer Prize-winning scholars are sniffed at by people without publications, because the Pulitzer is not really an academic prize.  If people want to resent you they will do so by any means necessary.

I agree with svenc, though, that you should get the shared job before you worry about the downside.

Good luck.

[hegemony]

We've gotten some really superior scholars as spousal hires -- in several cases undoubtedly better than we would have been able to hire if they were on the job market alone.  So we're quite enthusiastic about spousal hires.

[adampetershenne]

I've just come out of the spousal hire process, so I've got  some jumbled thoughts on this issue. I was the original hire, my wife the "trailing spouse." When I accepted the job, the school promised her consistent teaching work, but couldn't guarantee anything more. We were told a full spousal hire was impossible, but it was still our best prospect, so we took it.

Soon as we got here, even before classes started, everyone began saying to my wife, "You should try for a spousal hire!" Including the dean who had told us it was impossible. All of the faculty we met from my wife's potential department were very positive, and everyone told us the school was very strong on spousal hires. So we initiated the process, and all sorts of complications ensued that I won't go into here, except to say that several of the people who had claimed to be behind my wife 100% in fact put some weird obstacles in her path. But in the end, my wife was offered and accepted a tenure-track appointment, starting at part-time and moving to full-time over a period of several years.

In the process, though, we've learned a lot about what lies behind all the positive rhetoric about spousal hires here. On the one hand, the school has done lots of them; it's a very remote place and it's clear they couldn't get or retain faculty without a clear commitment to hiring academic spouses. So a lot of the faculty in most department were hired in this fashion, and people at all levels and positions were spousal hires. This suggests that at an institutional level at least, the spousally-hired are perfectly well-respected.

On the other hand, there's a wide range of individual or personal responses, more or less well-concealed. Some faculty are thrilled to have her because she can teach classes no-one else can; others don't object to her since she'll teach the survey classes nobody likes. But there's some too who are clearly resentful, for unarticulated reasons having to do with departmental politics, my wife's particular qualifications (she's better published than most of them but in a "radical" fringe of the field), or even tensions with the Dean's office: "Why does our dep't have to take on all the spousal hires for everybody else?" A lot of this is patently sexist, a lot of it is about individuals' ambitions (or desire to get their own partners hired), but some of it is just plain personal animosity.

The combination of these things makes it very uncomfortable for my wife to start out in this program, knowing that there's this visible tension but not how any particular individual is going to feel about her. She feels at best disrespected - she's a top-notch teacher and scholar, why should hiring her be such an unpleasant chore? There's some unresolved issues about her appointment, too, whether she's full faculty in a particular subprogram and authorized to teach the grad students or not; the subprogram wants to have a separate vote on her at some unspecified future time. So although we're very grateful to have solid employment on decent terms for both of us, especially in these troubled times yadda yadda, we're pretty unhappy with our quality of life as a result. And the odds are pretty good that we'll be back on the market again, if not next year then the following year.

All this to say, OP, that you all will face a huge range of responses. Positive results at the institutional level may not match up with personal responses, and vice versa, and there's no predicting who will react how. It's a surprisingly difficult situation for all involved even when it's working out well. I would imagine the best way to deal with it is to concentrate on other aspects of life and career. Be the best and most professional scholars/teachers you can, enjoy your family life or outside interests, and hope that any weirdness amongst your colleagues sorts itself out one way or the other. Living well is the best revenge strategy.