What happens after you successfully hire two academics who also happen to be partners in life? You can’t just declare victory and move on. You have to devote at least some time and thought to retaining the partners and keeping them happy — two things that may turn out to be mutually exclusive.
Since February I have been focusing the Admin 101 column on the complex issue of partner/spousal hires. So far the series has explored how to prepare for these dual hires, how to supervise the process, and how to negotiate the contracts. Now we turn to the long game. What principles, practices, and structures will help the partners and their institution thrive together? And what can you do, as the hiring administrator, if things go sour?
Check in on each partner’s progress. The logistical, personnel, cultural, and political challenges of a successful partner accommodation are temporarily solved once the contracts are signed. But versions of those challenges can reappear a year or a decade later.
Sometimes, for example, one or both partners shift the focus of their career and drift away from the institution’s original expectations of the hire. I heard from the chair of a science department at a top research university about a high-powered researcher who secured a spousal accommodation for his wife within his same department. Shortly afterward, however, he started to become less and less productive in grants funding. The department had agreed to the partner accommodation on the theory that “We need to keep this star moneymaker, so let’s help with his partner.” But as the luminary’s radiance faded, the grumbling began — both from other professors and from the dean — about why this partner hire had been funded in the first place. Meanwhile, the star’s wife was thriving as a faculty member — in other words, keeping up her side of the bargain. The chair felt caught in the middle.
In this series, David D. Perlmutter writes about pursuing a career in academic administration and about surviving and thriving as a leader:
In that case, there was no real solution. The deals were done. But in retrospect, the chair felt he could have kept in better touch with the partners about their career trajectories. Maybe some candid conversations about the consequences of decisions may have been helpful — or not. But inattention and silence never help.
Alternatively, it may be the partner whose career goals shift. A hired partner in a languages department at a regional university grew dissatisfied with the original lecturer position he was hired for. He wanted to be on the tenure track but he didn’t tell his partner, feeling embarrassed that he would come off as ungrateful for the negotiated accommodation terms. Luckily, he had developed a trusting relationship with an associate dean who coached him on the concrete steps he would need to achieve to apply for a tenure-track position, if one became available. It did and he was hired for it, fairly. The partners were satisfied with the new situation, and no one questioned the propriety since the second position was earned, not given.
Likewise, keep in touch with each partner’s supervisor. In both cases cited above, the partners were hired within the same department so the chair could easily keep tabs on them. But most partner hires involve different departments, different colleges, or even different branches of an institutional system, so it’s vital for the various leaders of those units to maintain lines of communication. You never know when you might have to troubleshoot a potential problem about an academic couple with another administrator.
To take one instance: The chair of a social-science department at a big state university recruited a faculty member whose partner was hired by the institution’s arts school. Both in terms of discipline and campus location, the two units were distant from each other. However, the department chair and the arts-program administrator had made a strong, positive connection in working together on the partner hire and stayed in touch. That’s how the social-science chair was able to find out that the partner in the arts unit was struggling in her teaching. He also learned that she hadn’t shared that information with her partner because she didn’t want him to worry or, worse, intervene on her behalf. Quite rightly, she wanted to maintain a professional identity, independent of her partner — the importance of which I have stressed throughout this series.
The administrators of both programs decided to meet with the arts partner and put together a plan that included encouraging her to attend workshops at the campus teaching center and shadow excellent teachers in the arts unit. Over the next year or so, her comfort level in the classroom and her course-evaluation ratings both improved. This happy resolution probably wouldn’t have resulted had the two chairs simply hired the partners and left them to sink or swim on their own.
Evaluate the partners separately. Gone are the days (I hope) when a dean would introduce an academic couple at a function as, “Our own Dr. William Burghley … and his lovely wife Elizabeth” — who also happened to be a doctorate-holding faculty member. Historically, female faculty partners were perceived and treated as the lesser-achieving spouse — which was not necessarily true then and is certainly not the case today.
Past malpractice is one of the reasons faculty members should maintain a professional identity distinct from that of their academic partner. But the onus is not just on the partners. If you supervise one or both of them, it’s also on you to act in ways that respect and acknowledge their separate work identities. Nowhere in either of their annual evaluations, for example, should you even hint at the idea that one partner’s record of research, teaching, and service is dependent upon the success of the other.
Still, centripetal drift happens. Be flexible when it does. My university has estimated that about 30 percent of academic hires come with a request for partner accommodation. Some of those couples arrive at the campus with joint professional identities and plan to continue collaborating on research. If two people met and bonded in a chemistry lab working on one line of study, your job is not to break up the research collaboration. Indeed, there is a phenomenon I have noticed in which, over time, some partners gravitate toward more and more mutual projects. Even if they are in different departments, the two may lead an overseas-studies program together or attend the same national conferences.
There’s nothing wrong with that. To take a famous instance, the world is better off because of the great love and complementary research minds of Marie and Pierre Curie. Their getting married dressed in lab coats signified how much their scientific work was a foundation of their romantic relationship, and vice versa.
And you can’t stop an academic couple from collaborating anyway. All you can do is delicately suggest that their joint professional work satisfy the following two “safety protocols” (neither of which you can actually enforce):
- Don’t make accommodation requests a habit. An agricultural-science chair told me about a faculty member who would regularly ask for extra funding, equipment, and other goods and services for his wife’s (separate) lab. Very early on, the chair made clear that his wife was welcome to come in and make her case but any “while you’re at it, can you give X to my partner’s lab, too” requests would not be granted.
- Be wary of political alliances. A voluble, activist faction led by or including an academic couple only feeds the fires of resentment in a department. As an administrator, your powers here are limited (and properly so) by respect for faculty governance and academic freedom. But you can advise the two partners that their careers and reputations could be damaged if they are perceived as leading a hostile junta.
What if they split up? After spending months arranging a partner hire, your worst fear is that the couple will break up, and leave an ugly swath of professional, political, emotional, and cultural wreckage in their wake — not just for them but for the people around them, too. A colleague in the sciences recalled the bitter divorce of his postdoc advisers, which left everyone in their lab feeling like “we were the children having to choose sides in a custody battle.”
In such situations, your influence is limited, and aggressive “managing” can do more harm than good. Very few academic administrators have degrees in marriage counseling. Picking a side — unless one of the partners is breaking laws or violating operating policies — is not your role. Even trying to act as a referee or “shoulder to cry on” may end with your being caught up in the chaos.
Your main duty as chair or dean is to mitigate damage to others. Stand up, for example, for the rights of graduate students to get their education and do their work in a non-hostile, non-retaliatory environment. Here, as well, is where it can pay off if you have built trust separately with each of the partners. Appeal to their sense of fair play and self-interest. Emphasize that professional behavior and not burdening others with one’s personal problems are smart career moves.
As a chair or dean, your goal should always be to avoid being a player or a partisan in the drama.
Faculty retention is less hectic and time-consuming than recruiting, but it’s not something that chairs, deans, and other leaders should leave to chance and circumstance. The long game of partner hiring depends on forces often outside of your control as an administrator. Academe is an enterprise that, by and large, gives many of our “workers” enormous autonomy, and we hope they use that privilege responsibly. But since we are dealing with humans, there are no guarantees.
With a little vigilance, occasional guidance, mutual trust, and common sense, the majority of partner hires can be fruitful for the partners and the hiring units. Of course some have been catastrophic — but then so have been some regular hires. All you can do as an administrator is advocate for the common good and for the best interests of each partner in the long term.
