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The Faculty Spouse: Finding Friends and a Job

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By Will Stallings

In my first missive about life as a faculty spouse, I related the tribulations of settling in as the husband of a newly hired assistant professor at a place I'll call Crestridge College. The college is located in the quiet Southern city of Crestridge, with a population under 20,000. The town's small size, coupled with its equally modest number of business and professional opportunities, presented some interesting challenges when I began to seek friends and look for a job.

When we first came to Crestridge, I spent part of my time writing while my wife plunged into academic life. I enjoyed working at home, but I had always hoped to find employment outside the house if for no other reason than to meet people.

There was also the income issue. The college wasn't exactly paying my wife, Susan, the big bucks. If I could bring in an extra paycheck, then we could maybe take a few vacations in the summer months, or buy a new car to help with the long trips home to visit family.

Not only that, but Susan was spending far more than 40 hours a week on her college duties. While bringing in another paycheck wouldn't necessarily lighten her workload, it would certainly increase our ability to procure creature comforts and meet the demands of what I dubbed "creeping Crestridge consumerism" -- our blatant attempt to pacify our unhappiness with products, goods, and services. It only seemed right that I try to find a job myself.

Just a few weeks into my search, my hope of finding something I'd actually like to do began to fade. Having labored as a factory-floor manager while my wife pursued her doctorate, I was hesitant to work in the industrial realm again. I didn't even apply for the few entry-level, low-paying manufacturing and warehouse jobs that were advertised in the area. Management jobs, industrial or otherwise, were also scarce in this small town. While I also have some experience as a journalist, the only outlet for those skills was a family-owned local newspaper. Not only did it pay woefully small wages, but there was little chance of advancement when the family had a lock on the top editorial positions.

Just when my employment options seemed to be heading toward nonexistent, I saw an ad in the local paper for a part-time job in the academic-affairs division of the college. While my credentials weren't perfect, I did have an advanced degree and some relevant experience. Maybe that was the reason I was offered the job, or perhaps the applicant pool was shallow enough that my head stuck above the crowd. In any event, I took the job, and suddenly Susan and I were both on the college payroll.

My status as faculty spouse quickly took on an added dimension. Previously, faculty members and administrators would only note my existence at the occasional social event. Now, professors who wandered into my little domain at Crestridge found me cheerfully helping them with various problems. Before long, I got to know a handful of them on my own, and carved out an identity other than "Susan's husband, whatever he does." Even a few of the elitist professors whom I had mentioned in my earlier column treated me in a civil fashion when I helped them. I had made the passage from faculty spouse to a full-fledged member of the campus.

Meanwhile, Susan and I were going through what was, at least for us, the awkward process of making new friends. Crestridge has three major social networks -- the church you attend, your kids' school and little-league teams, and your place of employment. Susan and I are childless, and we belong to a denomination that wasn't represented in the city's cluster of churches. Consequently, we didn't meet people at PTA or tee-ball games, or mingle over dinner on the grounds after Sunday services. That left our peers at the college as our primary social outlet.

I decided to make friendly overtures to a few of the other male faculty spouses -- a rare and select breed. The college has fewer than 80 faculty members; of that number, less than 15 percent are female. (Crestridge is not a bastion of enlightened feminism when it comes to faculty hiring.) Not all of them are married, leaving me with only a handful of fellow male spouses as a distinct peer group.

We began to meet for the occasional lunch or breakfast, sometimes gathering in the evenings with our wives for dinner. Together, professors and spouses, we were a diverse group with eclectic personal backgrounds and varied preferences in politics, literature, film, music, and art. Sometimes our differences provided grounds for conversation, but often an evening's discussion would shift back to our only real common denominator -- working at the college.

Unfortunately, several outspoken members of our group viewed the college through a filter of unmitigated pessimism. They seemed to wallow in their misery, preferring to painstakingly lament anything negative about the college (the dean's latest bad decision, the always precarious enrollment and retention rates, or their own woeful chances for tenure), rather than talk about something -- anything -- less gloomy. Before long, I was dreading social events with this crowd.

When we finally made friends who shared our interests and were willing to forgo Crestridge as an ongoing topic of conversation, it was then that another of the college's maladies began to affect us in ways we hadn't anticipated. A frequent complaint around the college was the high faculty turnover rate. Professors seemed to leave Crestridge in droves.

Whatever the reason behind their departures, the reality for Susan and I was that some of our closest friends left the college. It was then that we realized how much Crestridge was permeating our very lives. Susan and I both worked there, and we spent most of our limited social time with fellow Cresties, often with the din of the disaffected setting a negative tone. We both had to deal with the same handful of elitist and sometimes self-righteous professors and administrators, and we both found ourselves decompressing about work when we were at home.

It seemed like all we talked about was work. We talked about it while we were walking the dog, taking a hike, eating dinner, watching a movie, or just getting ready for the day. When we took trips out of town to the nearby "big city," or went to visit our families, the first hour or two of discussion was often dedicated to purging the Crestridge toxins from our systems.

In short, we felt trapped. Everything we did and everyone we knew was somehow attached to the college, and it began to seem that our only way out was to leave. Susan began to comb the academic job ads. I had come here with Susan into the unknown, and, as a faculty spouse, I was ready to pack up and leave. It was just a matter of time before the right job would emerge that would be our ticket out.