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[oldfullprof]

Entirely hypothetical: 

Suppose you have a pretty good but self loving a bit too much tenured person.  A job comes open his spouse could fill.  (He's not placed on the committee, of course.)  She makes it to the phone interview stage, but is not invited to campus.  When he finds this out, he approaches the provost to intervene.  The provost turns him down.  (The tenured person previously pomised not to try to interfer in all this.)  He then approaches the most sympathetic committee member (before any campus interviews have even taken place,) and says he managed to discover who the other candidates being interviewed are, and his spouse is better.  The next day, he tells another committee member he's mad, and the said committee member starts to chew him out (needed.)  He then responds that the committee member is a lame duck, and is messing up tenured member's life. 

Just couldn't keep it to myself, as Wally Lamb says.  Guess September was too long.

[tenured_feminist]

Wow, all the way to the provost as the first stop.

I'd encourage this person to go on the market and write him a really excellent letter of recommendation.

[janewales]

Inappropriate on every possible level, and it offers all kinds of ammunition to people who don't want to touch the spousal issue. We have had spouses in play at various stages of the process more than once (we're a big place), and all of the colleagues involved have been scrupulously professional throughout, no matter what happened.

[polly_mer]

Wow, all the way to the provost as the first stop.

I'd encourage this person to go on the market and write him a really excellent letter of recommendation.

Yep.  Toss that hot potato.

[untenured]

Wow, all the way to the provost as the first stop.

I'd encourage this person to go on the market and write him a really excellent letter of recommendation.

Hah!  A fine solution.

I bet that professor just lost a whole bunch of credibility with the provost by making all this noise.  And he gained nothing for it.

Thanks for sharing.

[anisogamy]

My curiosity has been sated!  Holy crap, that's inappropriate.

[larryc]

All of our troublesome colleagues should be so ineffective.

[zharkov]

One funny difference between academia and industry, in academia spousal hire upon hiring is common, but post-hoc is verboten.  In industry, it is just the opposite. 

About Mr. Hypothetical, he probably should have intervened much earlier in the process if spousal hire was that much of a big deal.  As in he'd need to move if the spouse found a job elsewhere.

I recall one school I worked, the scuttlebutt was that a certain faculty member was PO'd at my department b/c they didn't even give his spouse a courtesy interview when spouse applied some years earlier.  (Before my time.)

[mozman]

One funny difference between academia and industry, in academia spousal hire upon hiring is common, but post-hoc is verboten.  In industry, it is just the opposite. 

In my field (assuming the spouse is also a scientist), giving the trailing spouse a post-doc position is very common.  Usually 3 years of funding.

Maybe different in the Humanities where post-docs are a much bigger deal?

[seniorscholar]

In my humanities department, we have a lot of NTT lines and are actually fine with providing one for a post-hoc spousal hire (in the most recent case, after the children were in full-time school) -- provided the spouse has a good degree and has done an adjunct class from time to time, either here or elsewhere in the city, to have a teaching reference. Publication is not a consideration for the NTT lines in any case. The only spouses who have applied for TT lines have not made it to the interview stage, but in a city with a lot of colleges and universities they very often find a satisfactory position elsewhere, sometimes aided by another department member who has a spouse at the school concerned.

[oldfullprof]

Hypothetical might be at a teaching college with no post-docs to proffer.  Spouse might have had a great vita that could easily yield a TT or research job somewhere else nearby, but seemed too "narrow" to the committee.  We teaching places can often offer two or three adjunct classes a semester in a pinch, but "more" might have been expected by Mr. H.