From the issue dated March 17, 2000

Two Academic Careers and One Fulfilling Job By ELISABETH and LEWIS PERRY The two-career academic couple presents a persistently difficult challenge: what to do about hiring spouses. Recently, the conundrum has surfaced regularly in the news. Some of the cases have affected people we know, others have not. But many of the stories share the same themes: A professor threatens to leave an institution unless a job is created for his spouse. The administration refuses. The professor stays but makes it clear that he will raise the issue again. A widely recruited professor says she will consider applying for a post only if the institution offers her spouse a job, too. The dean tells the chair to "document a case for the hire." Two offers go out, and the husband and wife accept them, ending their years of commuting. A top candidate says that a job for his spouse isn't crucial, but when an offer is made, a second job suddenly becomes a sticking point. No one involved in the search knows much about the spouse; in the end, the candidate turns the offer down. A department cannot make a counteroffer to hold on to a valued faculty member who has a bid elsewhere, which includes a job for her spouse. New Ph.D.'s in the same field, looking for their first jobs soon after marriage, find themselves on a short list in competition with each other for the same job. Such stories may come out differently in other tellings, and we know that many of our colleagues have different perspectives on ALSO SEE: Colloquy: Join a debate on issues raised in this article them. But they recur in academic conversation everywhere. We are an academic couple, working in different fields of the same discipline. We are the same age, and we earned our Ph.D.'s in the same year. We married almost 30 years ago, in an era before affirmative action made national searches common for many jobs, and so we both got first jobs that were not advertised. When we decided to get married, it was not too hard to piece together a temporary job for Elisabeth at Lew's institution. The position was not tenure track, however, and, later, when we married, it was cut. As one colleague wished her well, he admitted that he had voted against continuing her. "Nepotism is an important issue, you know," he said, implying that we would have been better off not marrying! Since then, we've had our share of professional ups and downs. For many years, Elisabeth endured periods of unemployment, although usually managing to advance her skills with rewarding work. She worked on her own research and writing, and held various part-time, temporary, administrative and teaching posts -- some of which involved long-distance commuting. In several cities where we lived over the years, she also helped organize groups of women scholars that gave her the kind of collegial support she often had missed. While we hold no illusions that the old ways of making academic appointments were better than today's, in general we count ourselves among the lucky ones. We have been able to combine marriage (and raising children) with satisfying careers at good institutions among some helpful colleagues. We cannot say that we have "suffered" from having a two-career marriage. Nor can we pretend that we always knew what we were doing. We were often uncertain about the best way of discussing our goals with officials at our own institutions or at other institutions advertising jobs in our specialties. We received lots of contradictory advice. We made mistakes. After each trying a variety of ways to keep up a career -- from taking on part-time administrative posts to commuting short and long distances to separate institutions for different periods of time -- we now have entered a new stage. At the age of 60, we applied as a team for an endowed professorship. It was breathtaking to discover that at every stage of the application process -- from the first letter of inquiry through a convention interview and then campus meetings with students, faculty members, and administrators -- we could talk openly about what we both hoped for and what we both could offer. We also discovered that issues about allowing each of us to maintain autonomy, which had seemed so important in our relationship earlier on, no longer mattered. And, after a move last summer, we now share a position on equal terms. News of our move has led others living on or near the two-career front to share their stories with us. Hearing them has reminded us how many couples are still struggling with these issues. But we also realize that, in recent years, conditions have changed -- and so has our perspective. In 1983, Elisabeth wrote an essay for The Chronicle on "The Unhappy Lot of the Academic Couple with Two Careers and One Job." The article urged spouses and partners to "hang in there" -- not just for a year, but even longer -- keeping vitae alive and fighting depression with whatever challenging work could be found; to stay loose -- taking opportunities as they arose, shifting gears in midstream, even retraining in new academic fields if that meant getting on a strong career track; to "be aggressive (but not too!)" -- making contacts, giving papers, getting involved in support groups, and, at the same time, avoiding being labeled a "pain" by friends and potential colleagues. Finally, the piece made a plea for departments and administrators to think more imaginatively about what they could do to help get two-career couples better established in jobs. The situation for such couples has undeniably improved since 1983. Few faculty members and administrators today are surprised when the scholars they want to hire turn out to have academically inclined partners. Nor are they usually as resistant as they once were to the idea of trying to work something out for the accompanying spouse. For couples who married after they were both employed at an institution, the demise in the early 1970's of nepotism rules allows them to continue their careers. A few institutions even have a policy of helping spouses as much as possible: In some states, for example, several colleges pool their advertisements and direct them to couples. But the number of academic couples is rising, and they still face numerous challenges. So do the administrators who work with them. One dean we know says that 80 percent of the hiring decisions he makes involve spousal issues. If administrators are too passive in accommodating couples, they may lose people whom they would like to have around; if they can provide two satisfactory jobs for a couple, they may be able to hire or keep valuable faculty members. But such arrangements may break down in negotiations with departments that have their own priorities (or internal conflict over what those priorities should be). A department may even balk when the spouse of a job candidate is the best fit for its needs -- just because its members want to find their own "best" person. For couples seeking two positions, luck still plays a big role. There must be openings, or at least the potential for openings, and all departments involved must be willing to cooperate. The chances of those factors occurring at the same time are slim, but it does happen. In addition, both couples and administrators often remain unsure, as we usually were, about how to proceed. From whether to mention in a job interview that one has an academically trained spouse, to the advantages or pitfalls of job-sharing, difficult questions persist. Today, we stick to much the same advice Elisabeth gave in 1983; now, however, we realize more than we did before that every couple's case is unique, and that solutions often vary according to each partner's stage of life and career development. We accept the principle that no one is entitled to a job simply because of marriage to someone whom an institution wishes to retain or hire. At the same time, nobody should be precluded from employment because of marriage. Having said that, we'd like to plead for flexibility. Too many scholars apply the above principles rigidly. In professional organizations, for example, women's committees, remembering the old-boy networks of the not-so-distant past, oppose spousal appointments because such appointments often occur without an open, advertised search. Other scholars, after years of experiencing frustration or witnessing it around them, support almost all spousal appointments. We respect the first position and understand the second. But we believe there is no single response that fits all cases. Academic couples just starting out on careers pose one set of issues. When spouses are in the same field, they often face a choice between applying for the same job or sharing a job. When we were younger, job-sharing did not interest us. Each of us was too concerned about maintaining our autonomy. After training for individual careers, neither of us wanted to feel that we were giving up a goal that had sustained us for years. Nor did either of us want to be a "throw-in" (a term one insensitive chairman we dealt with liked to use). Each of us wanted to grow as a teacher by offering a range of courses in our field. We wanted to be treated like full-time faculty members, with benefits and research support. Besides, we knew of no models of job-sharing senior scholars whose precedent we could follow. On the other hand, we knew of many examples of unemployed or underemployed spouses -- most of them women -- who had eventually fallen out of their professions. Today, we would suggest that job-sharing could be a great way to start out. We recognize that young scholars may still share our concerns about the idea. But we also now know of couples who launched good careers by starting out together (each with a half-time job, but full benefits). Obviously, job-sharing doesn't provide the income of two separate jobs. Moreover, job-sharers can feel exploited if each member of the partnership starts to work more than half time (and defining "half time" in academe is not always easy). Tenure issues can be tricky, too -- suppose a department wants to give tenure to one spouse, but not the other. At the very least, anyone who is considering job-sharing should pay careful heed to contractual issues from the start. But the advantages probably outweigh the pitfalls. Sharing a job beats being in competition with one's spouse for a single opening, or commuting coast to coast, which many young couples today are doing. (Commuting isn't bad if a couple doesn't have children, or if the children are grown. But it's expensive and hard on relationships.) Job-sharing offers faculty status for both spouses, and time for both research and family life. Because it may offer a department two academic specialties for the price of one, it may also make the joint candidates more attractive. Finally, job-sharing appointments sometimes "evolve" into three-quarter or even full-time posts. They can also serve as springboards to moves to other campuses. If couples are in different fields, or are at different stages of progress toward a final degree, job-sharing is seldom an option. We can only make the rather obvious suggestion that they both apply for all openings and then decide where to relocate based on the results. One member of the couple might be in a field in which it is harder to find employment, such as medieval English literature, and the other in a field with better job prospects, such as computer technology. If the literature scholar lands a job, the computer technologist could then start a job search at the same institution or nearby. But should the literature scholar tout his or her spouse's skills during the recruitment process, before receiving an offer? That's a difficult call. Some scholars (for example, those who have a specialty in great demand or who answer an institution's affirmative-action needs) may be in a strong bargaining position. Others who raise the two-career issue too early have been known to kill their prospects. We have heard members of search committees speculate about whether or not a candidate will "make trouble" if his or her spouse fails to find a job. We've also heard young scholars criticized for having failed to give "fair warning" that they required two posts. Unfortunately, there's no alternative but to try to feel out the situation. Mid-career or senior academic couples should always be as direct as they can be about what they are seeking. That may require hard conversations between the partners. But, if they are going to insist on two positions -- full-time or half-time -- they should make that clear at an early stage in the search process. While "insist" may be too strong a word, an applicant should indicate that the issue of spousal employment is bound to come up if things proceed very far. Clarity about expectations will mean elimination at the outset from some searches. But it's better to know the possibilities early. And departments and administrators appreciate candor from the start. In midcareer or later, dual-career couples applying for a job may come up against the spouses of other faculty members at the institution who have long been denied a job. "How come they've created a job for him (or her) when they've ignored me all these years?" such a person might ask. Tread carefully, or you could find yourself in a hostile setting. Avoid any place that offers to bring you in with phony job ads, or without a thorough review of both spouses' credentials. In the end, both for couples seeking jobs and for administrators, the main thing to avoid is intransigence. Two-career academic marriages are complex. Only sensitivity, openness, flexibility, and honesty on all sides have a chance of working. Elisabeth and Lewis Perry hold the John Francis Bannon Professorship in history and American studies at Saint Louis University. http://chronicle.com Section: Opinion & Arts Page: B7 Easy-to-print version E-mail this article