Legacy Admissions—But for Spouses

Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield met during the first week of graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania in 1978. Both were pursuing Ph.D.s in English. The two married four years later. After graduation in 1985, Troost landed a tenure-track job at Washington & Jefferson College, a small liberal-arts college near Pittsburgh. That was great, but what about her spouse?

Washington & Jefferson is pretty close to Pittsburgh, and Pittsburgh is a big city. “Surely something will turn up for my husband,” Troost remembers thinking. But Greenfield’s specialty was the 16th-century English poet Edmund Spenser, who wrote The Faerie Queene. It turned out that several well-regarded Spenserists were housed at Pittsburgh universities, and many of their former students had remained nearby. “The Pittsburgh area was saturated with Spenser scholars,” Troost told me. Greenfield couldn’t find a job.

After years of short-term teaching gigs, including one a thousand miles away, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Greenfield finally landed a permanent faculty job within an hour’s drive of where he lives with Troost. He’s been commuting back and forth for 30 years.

That counts as a good outcome for an academic couple. Becoming a professor requires years and years of intense study, often carried out in isolation and poverty. This stretch will likely span the prime years of an academic’s young adulthood, exactly the time when they might expect to find a lifelong partner. Many find themselves in the same position as Troost and Greenfield, struggling to balance opportunities for work with the basic needs of their relationship.

This quandary is common on campus: According to a Stanford study, about 36 percent of academics at research universities are married or partnered with another academic. It’s so common, in fact, that professors have a name for it: the “two-body problem.” And the problem has only become more apparent in the decades since Troost and Greenfield got their doctorates.

Colleges and universities even have a formalized response. When the two-body problem arises, departments may engage in a practice known as partner hiring: They ask their deans or the heads of other departments to find or create a job for the partner of a person they’d like to hire. Sometimes those extra jobs are tenure-track (the kind that scholars want most), but other times they are something less: lectureships, research positions, or even staff positions such as project managers. Some schools allocate part of their budget for partner hires every year, considering it a recruitment expense. Others turn to regional contacts, hoping to place scholars at nearby institutions for mutual benefit.

[From August 1935: Twilight of the professors]

The practice of accommodating academic spouses is now second nature in higher education. It’s part of the furniture of academic life, casting its shadow across every school and each department. Partner hiring is widely understood to be beneficial and even necessary when it comes to faculty recruitment. But its effects on the academic labor market, and on the research and educational practice of colleges and universities, is still poorly understood. Hiring—or refusing to hire—academic partners can have a dramatic impact on morale; and faculty are hardly of one mind about its virtue.

The American public, whose trust in higher ed is at historic lows, may wonder why an employment practice that would seem shocking in most other industries is so commonplace on campuses. (Imagine if jobs were handed out to spouses at investment banks, aerospace contractors, or magazines.) This may be seen as evidence that higher ed is out of touch with reality. Or else it might be taken to suggest that colleges and universities are far ahead of that reality—that they can even be a model, if imperfect, for businesses that understand their workers as members of families too.

If partner hiring sounds like nepotism, that’s because it is, by definition. During the first half of the 20th century, most universities maintained strict policies that prohibited the recruitment of wives and husbands into faculty positions at the same school or department. This rule may have kept some unqualified spouses out of academia, but it also prevented many qualified spouses—in particular, many qualified women—from securing jobs. One famous instance of the latter was Maria Mayer, a theoretical physicist who won a 1963 Nobel Prize; she’d been blocked from a full-fledged faculty job at Johns Hopkins University in the 1930s because her husband worked there too.

Over time, schools dropped the anti-nepotism rules and looked for new ways to manage a tricky situation. Clearly, recruiting and retaining the best professors required making accommodations for their spouses. The schools that did so performed better than the ones that didn’t. I spoke about the practice with two labor economists, Matthew Kahn of the University of Southern California and Harvard’s Larry Katz. Both are married to other, very successful labor economists; Katz’s wife is the Nobel Prize winner Claudia Goldin. And both told me that excellent colleges and universities in small cities are ranked lower than their big-city peers in part because of colocation issues that make it harder for these schools to bring in power couples. Given that circumstance, Katz said, an ambitious institution such as Williams College, located in a tiny town in Massachusetts three hours from Boston and New York City, has no choice but to hire partners to compete for the best faculty.

Beyond recruitment, schools may gain other advantages by competing for partners, says Lisa Wolf-Wendel, a professor at the University of Kansas and a co-author of The Two-Body Problem: Dual-Career-Couple Hiring Practices in Higher Education. “Institutions went bonkers” for partner hires over the past few decades, she told me, when they started cutting lifetime tenure-track positions in favor of shorter-term jobs. That meant they could offer lower-commitment, lower-pay, non-tenure-track posts to one half of a faculty couple, who might be thrilled to take such a deal instead of nothing. These days, she said, making people happy through the use of partner hires may be less important than saving money.

[Read: Universities have a computer-science problem]

The same policies and practices may also help schools address an ongoing challenge: faculty diversity. Partner hires help increase gender equity in fields that need it. They may also help to even out the proportions of faculty by race. This is often celebrated as another salutary effect of creating jobs for people’s spouses. Daniel J. Blake, a professor in the department of educational-policy studies at Georgia State University, is married to a neuroscientist, Ivette Planell-Mendez, who is finishing a doctorate at Princeton. He told me that her experience in academia inspired him to formally study partner hires, and that his research has convinced him that this system is “essential” to advancing equity.

Whatever a college or university’s initial motivations for making partner hires, doing so provides long-term benefits for faculty and students alike, Wolf-Wendel said. “The best way for college students to be successful—that is, to graduate—is to have high levels of faculty interaction.” Solving professors’ two-body problems makes this feasible, by keeping faculty more engaged with campus life. And once an academic couple has solved their two-body problem, they may be less likely to stray. Nathan Singh and Abby Green are both physicians and cancer biologists with appointments at the Washington University School of Medicine. “We’ve really gotten our feet down,” Singh says of his situation; the kids are in school and soccer, he and Green are content in their jobs, and it would be a big pain to seek and then negotiate two new ones, let alone move to another city for them.

As a university professor whose spouse is not an academic, I’ll admit that I have struggled to accept the doctrine of partner hires. Why should someone be handed a second job and income for the happenstance of their family life, when my household would never get the same consideration? That prejudice only worsened when I saw friends, acquaintances, and job candidates turn down really good partner deals that didn’t meet their expectations—a high-paid staff job created expressly for a partner, for example, or a long-term faculty position that wasn’t also on the tenure track. And surely office life is complicated by partner hires. I once interviewed for a job in a small academic department where, by my count, 40 percent of the faculty were married to each other. It seemed incestuous.

In The Two-Body Problem, Wolf-Wendel and her co-authors spend a chapter running through these and other “common concerns” about the practice. Among the issues that they raise, fairness is foremost. Faculty without academic partners may feel like they’re getting screwed, or that being single has become a source of discrimination. Even faculty couples who have had the benefit of partner hires may themselves feel poorly treated, if, for instance, they see other couples get better deals than they did.

Some academics have the further worry that spouses fill up jobs that could have gone to other, more qualified candidates. In truth, some open roles would not exist but for the partner hires that facilitated them. And research suggests that scholars in academic marriages are no less (but also no more) productive, in terms of publications, than those who are not.

The use of nepotism as a means of adding to diversity may also come off as cynical. I have sometimes heard academic deans confess that partner hires offered the easiest route to better equity in their departments. And understandably, academics are aware that diversity can offer some advantage in their cutthroat profession. John Dean Davis, an architectural historian at the Ohio State University, told me that he and his then-wife, who is both Latina and “a rock star” in her field, presented “an easy case to the deans and provosts at the very white, midwestern schools” where they received job offers.

Even when administrators’ aims are pure, creating jobs for people’s spouses may still produce unwanted outcomes. Women tend to accept worse partner-hire offers than men, Blake told me. Hiring committees have been shown to assume that women academics are more “movable” than men, in general. Blake’s research also found that Black and Latino faculty reported facing significant scrutiny and skepticism while being considered for partner-hire roles.

The same policies may also serve to narrow the variety of scholarship that is present on campus. “One of the mantras of people who are anti-higher-ed right now is that there is a lack of diversity of thought, that the academy is too liberal,” Wolf-Wendel told me. “My guess is that if you hire spouses, you’re just going to reinforce that.” She added that spousal hires may reinforce the public’s sense that tenure is elitist and that assisting a spouse or partner to find work just extends that elitism.

Partner-hire-seeking professors might themselves be guilty of restricted thinking. Troost suggested that the narrow scope of scholarly training, especially at elite institutions, tends to give early-career academics the sense that they are owed a job within their own, small areas of scholarship; and I suspect that couples who have just received their Ph.D.s may now expect to find two perfect jobs instead of one. A policy of finding work for people’s spouses may only stiffen these beliefs. Instead of encouraging job candidates to broaden their skills—and thus increase their value for potential employers and future students alike—it tells them that work in higher ed can be tailored to their needs.

The two-body problem, and the tensions around its partner-hire solution, may only worsen in the years to come. A partner needing a job used to be a small, idiosyncratic thing, Katz, one of the labor economists, told me. “Now there’s almost no case of senior- or mid-career recruitment where this isn’t an issue.”

But as two-income families continue to proliferate, this challenge shouldn’t necessarily be limited to academia. The particular conditions of academic hiring—limited job market with localized opportunities—may exacerbate two-body problems. But surely doctors, lawyers, and financiers have some version of them too. What if the oddity of partner hiring isn’t that it’s particular to higher education, but that other industries haven’t followed suit? Maybe it’s less perverse to treat workers as members of families with collective needs than it is to assume that every individual ought to fend for themselves.

Research from Kahn, one of the labor economists, and his labor-economist wife, Dora L. Costa, suggests that college-educated couples in any industry tend to be drawn to major metropolitan areas with more opportunities for them to seek out dual careers. As industry and population has consolidated into fewer, larger cities, the small or midsize ones have suffered. Perhaps nonacademic employers in those places would be smart to lure workers with family deals, just like the deans in higher ed. Or maybe colleges and universities, with their endowments and tax exemptions, should take a greater interest in their local communities, and invest the same money they’d devote to hiring a second tenure-track professor into jobs at area companies.

A “family business,” when it doesn’t refer to the Mafia, has always been seen as a moral and economic good in America. We celebrate the mom-and-pop establishment—not just for its service to a community, but for its embrace of the idea that affection and commitment can be a catalyst for labor. Professors (and other professionals) might portray themselves as superior to such common ideas, but of course they are not. “Academics have always fallen in love with other academics,” Kahn told me by phone from his house in Los Angeles. I could hear Costa in the background, and then Kahn’s muffled voice as he tried to lure her to the phone too, to put down whatever task she was undertaking in favor of discussing economics instead.