Two Careers, One Relationship: An Interim Report on “Spousal” Hiring and Retention in English Departments

IN THE olden days, according to some historians of academic life hiring was simple. You didn't have to craft a job announcement that amounted to a binding public contract; you didn't have to run a job interview as if you were confronting a Philadelphia lawyer in court; and you didn't have to worry about finding jobs for spouses or “significant others.” Nowadays, for better or worse, chairs of English departments have come to realize the every phase of hiring is more complex than is used to be. But the most vexed and frustrating one of all is supplying a job for the top candidate's partner that will persuade the couple to accept the offer.

The difficulty of two-career situations in academia has been around for a long time; in 1976, the MLA Commission on the Status of Women in the Profession issued a pamphlet entitled Careers and Couples: An Academic Question. That publication, a collection of personal statements about the inequities for women who wanted to combine professional and family lives, articulated a series of modest aspirations: it asked the profession to establish respect and some rights for part-time faculty members, to recognize the potential good of hiring faculty spouses on tenure-track appointments after they had proved themselves in visiting or non-tenure-track positions, and—most radically—to institute shared appointments for couples who wanted them. Overall, there was the plaintive hope that in a brighter future hiring departments might give a modicum of attention to the attachments of professional appointees.

Since the mid-eighties there has been a steady stream of news items about the spousal component of hiring and retaining employees. For many years, business and government have been aware that hiring one employee might involve providing a situation that the whole family would find acceptable. In recruiting, corporations have made increasing efforts to attend to the spouse's housing, child-care, and career needs. This concern has become so pervasive that it is by now part of popular culture. Two recent hit movies, for example, have highlighted the potential terrors of commuting. Bruce Willis's reunions with his corporate-commuter wife in the two Die Hard films are punctuated by a mounting series of bloody complications that may seem a variation on the more mundane tortures of other long-suffering commuting couples, who have own versions of murderously arrogant officials, hostage-taking computer systems, weary explorations down sinister passageways, and interminable waits for their whole sorry narratives to come to an end. And now the problem has come decisively to English departments as they try, in an ever more competitive national market for “stars,” to replace faculty members who will be retiring in the mid-nineties and to retain younger senior professors. For these departments, and for the ambitious deans and provosts who urge them to hire “the best,” the imperative to find jobs for spouses has become not merely a response to feminist reforms but a strategic necessity in recruiting and retaining valued faculty members. Recently the leading academic officer of a state university in the Northwest explained the situation to his department chairs in crisis language:

If the University … is to hire the best from the faculty hiring pools, then we must facilitate the spouse's job search. … [O]ur colleges, schools, and departments would be prudent to build into curricular and research planing the dual-career factor, something new for American academia. …

In March 1989, recognizing this trend as a challenge not only to departmental recruitment committees but to many of the job applicants, the Executive Committee of the ADE appointed us, the authors of this report, as an ad hoc committee to study and report on the two-career situation. We circulated a request for information to departments around the country, asking for firsthand commentary on spousal-hiring policies, problems, solutions, and prospects, and we have now reviewed and analyzed the eighty responses we received. On the basis of the letters, most of which involve extensive narratives about particular cases (always anonymous, however) and thoughtful reflections on successes and failures in managing two-career appointments, we can make number of observations about the problem of “spousal or relational” placement—a locution we invented to cover all combinations and permutations. None of the replies offers a surefire way of achieving the ideal of disinterested hiring while maintaining a humane concern for the lives of faculty members, but almost everyone who wrote agrees that the problem is acute and hopes that we can shed some light on it. Most respondents agree with the chair who urges that we solve, rather than evade, the issue: “If the Princeton report on the shift in new humanities faculty members available for jobs in the next ten to fifteen years is accurate, and with the continuing evolution of two-career families, we unquestionably face an issue of grave concern to the profession.”

Before we move to a more detailed description of our findings, however, we want to try to articulate the complexities that seemed to beset even the most optimistic of our respondents. In the first place, the very notion of considering personal circumstances in the hiring decision may represent a departure from the policy of choosing only the “best” mind and talent for every job opening. Indeed, such extraneous preoccupations might themselves distort our concept of an academic vocation—valorizing “coupledom” over the single state, defining the academic community in inappropriately familial terms, asking for too intimate a connection between private life and public work. One of our respondents summarized this dilemma eloquently:

I'm afraid I'm old enough to think that the nepotism rules of the past were very sensible and probably saved more anguish than they created. Vows of celibacy had much to be said for them and would provide for administrative clarity, but are presumably not a solution. Muddling through is not policy, but a likelihood. I think that the overriding concern must ultimately be the quality of education and not personal arrangements. Policies that reflected such a view might not be popular, but would at least be honest.

Why should we even consider such personal questions, much less give them the dignity of a national survey? our committee asked. An answer came from another of our respondents: “I can't help feeling that those who wish to preserve some king of ‘purity’ of meritocracy in this realm have simply not been out in the real world—the real world, notably, of hiring and recruitment.”

We engage our study under this rubric of realism, then, but not without a worrying sense of some other points of moral conflict. The affirmative-action benefit from dual-career hiring, for example, is not a foregone conclusion. As a matter of fact, once we ask why departments are now so interested in dual-career hiring, we find ourselves confronting the possibility of a conflict between the ideals of giving aid to the dispossessed and the realities of academic hierarchies. Spousal hiring serves the recruitment of women because one member of the pair is usually a woman, but it could also involve suspending national searches and favoring the male partner over an equally or more qualified female candidate. Suspecting that exemptions from affirmative-action requirements had become instrumental in hiring husbands primarily, the Faculty Women's Caucus at one large university requested a moratorium on such exemptions unit it could be assured that the program was not just another way to recruit more men. Looking at the issue from another angle, that of hiring wives as a corollary to recruiting their senior husbands (several examples were noted in our survey), we were led to ask whether such actions should be counted as moves against patriarchy or as further indications of its continuing power in academia. Of course, our survey gave counterexamples of a man's getting a job because his female partner was the desired hire, but once again there is a dilemma: why give an available slot to another male hire if the department's critical need is to hire all women? Hiring men and women in equal numbers now will not make up for all the asymmetries of hiring in the past—especially in small departments with rare vacancies.

Another area of conflicting values in dual-career hiring is faculty governance. Most departments want some versions of open covenants rather than special deals in personnel decisions. But frequently a spousal hire has to be decided on quickly, deans have to be pressured, favors from other departments have to be returned, and the pristine order of a committee's rankings may have to be violated. Is the cost in faculty governance balanced by the gain in departmental development? Can the spouse so appointed ever be fully accepted into a department? Will one “special” spousal hire mandate attention to all the other cases that lurk in the background of almost every English department?

Even when everyone is working openly, however, there are harsh decisions to be made, some of which may reverberate for a long time. Smaller departments, where positions are sparse, struggle with issues that require difficult choices. Should the department be more concerned with “humanely” filling an available position with a spouse who has already served the department competently, often in a part-time capacity, or should it conduct a national search? Should the department hire the accompanying spouse of a first-choice candidate, or should it be more concerned with adding to its depth and breadth by seeking a better candidate from a different school? In questions like these, we were brought time and again to consider the unalterable fact that dual-career hiring and retention involve shifting confrontations among competing values in most English departments. It seems to us, finally, that the conflict narrows down to a single locus of tension among three adamantine sources of crisis: the guarantee of lifetime tenure, the growing sense among couples that their relationships are the primary consideration in job choices, and the increasing tenuousness of relational commitments as they unfold over time.

The Parameters of the Problem

Responses to our inquiry reveal that the dimensions of the dual-career problem are multiple. The size, location, and policy of the institution are critical factors that affect a department's ability to respond.

Both large and small institutions are concerned about recruitment and retention. The chair of one mega-university in the Midwest writes:

I can say with great emphasis that the whole issue has immensely affected our hiring in recent years—the last six or seven at least. We have lost a number of candidates because we … couldn't provide suitable career opportunities for their spouses.

And the chair of a respected midwestern liberal arts college also reports “both explicit difficulties and more indirect problems in this area.”

Institutions in large metropolitan areas are generally more helpful about spousal placement because of the proximity of other institutions that offer job possibilities, particularly part-time openings. Nevertheless, when the spousal hire involves a second position in English or in another academic department, within the institution or outside, the situation can be bleak even in the largest universities. A chair from another major state research institution proclaims:

While it is often observed that the university … is in an advantageous situation for spousal hiring because of its location in a large urban area with many diverse opportunities, the fact appears to be that in most instances this avails us nothing.

Even so, institutions in remote locations have fewer options. The chair at a northwestern state university writes:

In this era of two-career marriages we … are going to face such challenges [finding employment for spouses] frequently, and a school located in a small town nowhere near a large metropolitan area has certain permanent disadvantages that no policy will overcome. Recruiting high-quality faculty members will be—no, already is for us—more and more difficult.

Although one of the main barriers to spousal hiring in the past was the prevalence of antinepotism laws, few colleges and universities now expressly forbid spousal hiring. Most schools have policies that prevent one spouse from supervising the other or from participating in discussions concerning the other's salary or promotion, and a third party usually the supervisory arrangements. Some college administrations, however, have begun to address the presence of dual-career couples formally, either by establishing consistent administrative practices or by elaborating past policies. As we have already noted, the recruitment and retention of spouses have become doctrine, especially at large and ambitious research institutions, where the competitive possibilities are particularly enticing. Here is one of the most positive approaches, from one of the nation's leading research departments. “The general attitude in [our] administration is that every appropriate effort should be made to find positions for the spouses or partners of applicants or present faculty members. …” A few other departments, again at state research universities, have access to institutional funds that allow them to hire spouses without depleting departmental resources. Other large universities have funded spousal-placement ombudspersons, not only to make contacts with hiring departments but also to network with nonacademic employers.

Internal departmental policies (or their lack) reveal a wide range of attitudes about the desirability of having spouses work in the same department. A few schools most of them small liberal arts colleges, report that they simply will not consider hiring spouses or that they “look askance” at spouses who might seek employment. In contrast, many departments have arrived at policies similar to the one at the research department we found most actively committed to spousal placement. “Within the department, the guideline arrived at by the committee on hiring, tenure, and promotion … is that spousal or partner hiring is ‘appropriate’ when the department would wish to hire the spouse or partner on that person's own merits.” Such a formulation is easy to articulate and hard to implement, especially when merit comes up against disciplinary need in a smaller department. Nevertheless the principle generally holds as an ideal; another administrator from a smaller; less traditional department captured the essence of the ethical dilemma that both large and small departments must negotiate:

Any solution, any replacement [of spouses] must contribute positively to the curriculum, the university community, and the students' experience. We cannot focus only on hiring spouses at the expense of providing a quality education for our students. Right now we continue to struggle with that line between quality and humanity, the happiness of faculty and educational opportunities for students.

Strategies, Solutions, and Failures

Departments are already devising strategies for many kinds of situations. In the absence of broader discussion and the exchange of information across the profession, departments are responding to specific couples with specific stories in ways that may be innovative or conventional, empowering or delimiting. Relational hirings involve problems in two frameworks: recruitment and retention.

In our narratives, retention rarely arose as a problem unanticipated during recruitment. That is, the issue was almost always held over from a unresolved difficulty in the initial hiring and a fear that tensions in the new hire's private life would induce a job change in a year or two. The tensions often arose because one partner, or both, was commuting to work, but underemployment seems to be an even more common concern, since commuting has apparently become less frequent. One of our correspondents, who had “endured twelve years of a commuter marriage,” ended her account with the grim suggestion that “part of the postfeminist backlash has taken the form of a general loss of sympathy for commuting couples.” In overview, we could not find substantial evidence of such a backlash on the part of responding department chairs (of which 28% were women), but a dean at a school in a small city near a major metropolis insisted that the department not hire a commuter but, rather, recruit candidates who would live within the community. This may be a consideration in even smaller settings, where being a member of a department is in some sense being a citizen of a community—or even a member of a family. And there were some indications that candidates who opted for commuting made something less than a full commitment to their departments.

The relatively few examples of retention issues involving longer-term faculty members rose from new relationships or marriages, which usually followed the termination of previous relationships. The new alliances may “solve” another set of problems that need to be considered in relational hiring. The strategies outlined below almost exclusively concern recruitment.

The Other in a recruitment story needs to find a position in one of three professional settings: outside academe; inside academe, but outside English; and inside academe, inside English. The need for nonacademic employment is by all accounts the easiest to address. A good many responding departments already have procedures in place (or their universities do) for linking partners to local films. A few departments in sparsely populated areas, however, reported that candidates had turned down jobs because of partners who were fearful about finding professional placement in a rural or small-town setting (we noted almost no partners seeking work outside the professions). But our batch of letters did not in fact contain many examples of partners who were attorneys, doctors, accountants, or businesspersons. One department chair, in a large midwestern university, commented that the institutions location in a major city hadn't helped in recruitment, because almost all the candidates' partners were other academics. We also suspect that partners who can work in hospitals or law firms may solve their problems on their own and not require the attention of colleges or universities. In community college recruitment, most partners already have jobs locally, since most faculty members in two-year colleges are recruited locally.

The vast majority of strategies reported to use concerned the partner in academe and, more often than not, also in English; after all, most relationships are formed when the partners are attending graduate school or working together. Recruitment strategies for these hard cases work on two levels: for beginning jobs and for star jobs (a special few entry-level candidates are designated starts too).

Dealing for starts is the subject of the largest amount of folklore within the profession, but it is not the norm in hiring. For every famously mobile academic couple there are a dozen others who have discovered that when one partner asks a department to supply two jobs, the answer is that there's no room at the inn. And our sense is that this answer is usually true; few universities have the resources to hire prestige couples in tandem. Coupled starts come in two groups: stars partnered with other stars and stars partnered with ordinary lights. The first group has the best chance at two tenure-attack jobs in the same department, whether or not there were two jobs initially. That is, the other eminent scholar or critic assuming the couple was not recruited as a couple) has the best chance at the rarest solution of all, a second tenure-track position protected from a national search.

When the partner is not a national figure, it is more important that a new tenure-track position be protected from a national search. But this sort of dealing seems very rare among our respondents. More commonly, the “extra” job provided was a one-year position or a staff position. Again, these jobs usually revolved around the English department, where the importance of the recruitment would be obvious. The partner was named editor of the college magazine, say, or appointed to the staff of the inevitable advanced composition course. Dealing with other departments, as we say below, was always more problematic.

Most of the respondents' stories about academic partners involved entry-level hiring. Two scenarios topped our charts: recruitment by offering the partner a part-time or temporary job and failure to recruit.

Among the success stories, two of the most common were clearly connected. The usual solution was to give the partner a part-time or temporary job, primarily because departments in large universities have money and lines ready to allocate for this purpose but also because this approach provides an opportunity to see the partner in action. Thus the department reduces the chance of taking a second-rate person on board just to land the primary candidate. The second, related common solution was to elevate the part-time partner to a regular job within a couple of years (in our sample, promotions were given to about once out of every three persons hired on a part-time or temporary basis).

Other strategies worked too. Sometimes though not often, the academic partner landed a job at another institution nearby. A little more often, the couple shared a position; but although in the seventies this solution seemed to some to be wave of the future, it has not proved to be. About as often the partners landed jobs in the same department in independent job searches during the same year; the hiring department sometimes knew of their connection and sometimes did not. Occasionally one department traded with another to obtain a position for the partner. These interdepartmental trades were often very difficult to arrange, and chairs worried about symmetry. In several examples, English departments were asked to accommodate other departments that they perceived as having more clout inside the university and that they thought might get out of paying up later. In any event, could one be confident that an English candidate would show up one day with a partner in engineering, or even in the sciences?

Another solution may really have been no solution: commuting in a way that requires two residences. Our sample contained some commuting partners, but the common assumption was that this arrangements was short-term (although we had one dramatic example of a couple that, given the option of teaching together, chose not to do so).

Indeed, we noted that some “solutions” have a kind of instability that presages further change: a joint position is likely to become two (somewhere, somehow); a commuting couple is likely to stop commuting (to be together, to stop being together); and younger partners with part-time work do not remain in their positions. Reasons for these changes are not hard to find. One is money. Whether because of rising expectations about “life-style” or the rising costs of living the old life, couples cannot accept either subsisting on one salary or maintaining two households on two salaries and commuting significant distances. Another explanation testifies to a heightened consciousness about gender and professional issues: one job for two people or part-time work for overqualified partners inevitably carries the taint of exploitation and dignifies neither the jobholder nor the institution. We did find some redistribution of jobs by gender (male partners holding part-time jobs, for example), but we did not find a lot.

Finally, stories of failure were common. Department chairs gave several reasons for their inability to recruit their top choices: no money was available for the needed extra job (in whatever department); the partner was not a strong enough candidate; the partner's field or rank was wrong. For each reason we have a range of stories and nuances. A few universities do have some money for partner positions, but not enough to fund tenure-track jobs. The issue of “good enough” seems to arise especially in equal-opportunity searches, perhaps because of the notion of equity already on people's minds and because of a certain dramatic irony. We heard several stories about female candidates whom departments very badly wanted to recruit but whose partners seemed considerably less strong. In such circumstances, faculty members asked, was it wise, fair, or prudent to accept the weaker partner (assuming the line was available) to recruit the stronger woman?

In all these examples, the department knew of the partner quite early. But in many other instances, the department learned about the partner only after offering the primary candidate a job. In such situations, department chairs may or may not have been able to find appropriate positions for the partners. In any case, it is now relatively safe for a woman to assume that a department chair's interest in her relational status is vocational rather than sexist. Most chairs want to be told if there is a problem to solve.

Not surprisingly, the biggest constraint on recruiting couples proved to be a lack of money: most departments just don't have the funds to hire partners, however well qualified. The best hope of overcoming this obstacle lies in the imagination of the chair, the dean, or the department: solutions of many different stripes, tailored to particular contexts, do sometimes work.

Suggestions for the Future

The remedies department chairs offer tend to be moderated by their own understanding of fiscal realities. If there were enough money to hire couples, of course, many English departments could readily provide enough work for the partners to do. But deans don't always see it that way. Given the constraints, however, there are some practical suggestions: we reproduce an excellent list drawn up by Frederick M. Link, professor of English at the University of Nebraska:

1. Departments
   1. Always give candidates the opportunity, within the law, to express concern about matters that may affect their decisions to accept or reject job offers.
   2. Always follow up on any expression of concern involving a spouse. If there is no money to bring in the spouse, encourage the candidate to do so at the couple's own expense. No matter who pays, set up appointments and help the spouse to investigate job opportunities in the area.
   3. Always treat the spouse independently of the candidate so far as all this is concerned. It is important for spouses to feel wanted to welcomed for what they, independent of their partners, may have to offer the institution or the community.
2. Colleges and Universities
   1. Identify and circulate full information about all tenure-track and other job possibilities in the institution that might in any way appeal to spouses with careers and that are to be filled in the next year or two.
   2. Work with the local chamber of commerce and local employment agencies to develop an extensive list of the kinds of career opportunities that are available in the area and include contact personnel and telephone numbers. Try to work out an arrangement that allows for interviews on short notice.
   3. When a candidate indicates that a job opportunity for a spouse is a consideration, provide the money to bring our both partners and set up as many useful appointments and contacts in advance of the visit as is possible; $800 is a small price to pay for getting one's top choice.
   4. Work with institutional units and nearby colleges and universities to develop a policy and procedures for finding good places within the institution for spouses who have serious academic qualifications. For example, ask to mortgage lines a year of two in advance, to have a mechanism for making appointments that provide spouses with a year or two in which to look for suitable positions.
   5. Develop a policy that makes it possible to recruit two-career couples within or across units.
   6. Where nothing works, and the spouse has to locate at some distance, develop ways to help the couple. A travel allowance is an obvious possibility, a specially arranged teaching schedule another, a visiting professorship a third (if the spouse is an academic).

Beyond the sensible suggestions we would point to more radical possibilities. Some schools have for example, drawn up elaborate procedures for spousal hiring and retention; whether these clear the air or lower the departments' morale remains to be seen. Other departments have tried new ventures in network hiring. In one case, partners were hired at schools within the same general region (though four hours apart by automobile) under an offer that provides intermeshing leaves and visiting appointments between the two institutions. Thus over the foreseeable future, the partners will have a continuing sequence of two years together and then two years commuting. That solution is unique in our survey, but it might encourage departments within the same general area to cooperate better with one another. For cooperation seems the only genuine answer where the need is most urgent, where new faculty members and their partners are committed to making their lives careers somehow fir together. Their hope for the future is a commodity that most of the chairs in our survey value and seek to safeguard. Abundant pleas for cooperation outside the boundaries of English departments were echoed in the words of the chair of a university in the West:

If any resolutions are possible, I think they must be developed at the central institutional level. Institutions can do a better job than individual units can in monitoring recruitment and informing departments when other colleagues face spousal issues in recruitment or retention that collaborative efforts might address. And institutions could cooperate regionally.…

Department chairs in our survey did report fears about the future, however, looking down the road that stretched ahead after the deals, compromises, and arrangements. Life in a department with couples (where that was the solution) was not the subject of much anxiety. Few department chairs who had worked with partners in the department reported cases of voting in tandem or of marital conflict surfacing publicly. But there was considerable fear about the inevitable divorces or breakups, and we heard a few unsavory stories. Perhaps these stories are no more unsavory than other tales about loyalty and betrayal in academe. In the words of an East Coast chair, “Problems are almost inevitable. It's impossible for people to share houses, children, finances, beds, and so on and not let it show in their professional relationships.” As workplaces across America become less gendered, perhaps the pleasures and threats of partners working together will become a general experience—though the specific conditions of academe (tenure, the ideal of disinterested personnel decisions) do color the satisfactions and dangers in a special way.

Members of the ad hoc committee
Mary Burgan, Indiana U (chair)
George Butte, Colorado C
Karen Houck, Bellevue Comm C
David Laurence, ADE

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