Colleges and universities are far more open to partner hiring — what used to be called “spousal accommodation” — than when I first entered the job market 30 years ago. The premise is simple: A lot of academics are married to or partnered with other academics, so the hiring of one creates a chance to hire two.
But the policies, procedures, funding schemes, and cultural norms surrounding a dual hire (or “opportunity hire”) are tricky — for the partners, for you as the administrator supervising the process, and for your institution. These hires have so many dimensions, personal and procedural, that I will devote four essays in the Administration 101 series on campus leadership to their planning, implementation, onboarding, and aftercare.
First, the good news: Institutions that focus money and attention on partner hiring will truly find it an “opportunity” to progress as an aspirational workplace. You will attract great colleagues, and they will (in most cases) be happier and more likely to grow roots and make consistent contributions to your institutional goals. If all goes well, partner hires are a triumph for all parties involved.
The bad news is that they can also blow up in your face — frustrating individual careers, depressing faculty morale, saddling you with runaway costs, and causing infighting between departments and colleges. Partner hires are bureaucratically complicated with many jurisdictions overlapping.
So begin the partner-hiring process with careful planning, knowing what can go wrong and what should go right.
Different departments and colleges have different hiring rules — and the rules change. Sometimes these hires involve recruiting two partners into the same department, but usually they are in different fields. One department wants to recruit someone and asks another department if it will take on the candidate’s partner. Across academe, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to partner hires. So it’s important that you comprehend the bureaucratic and cultural nuances of hiring an academic couple on your particular campus and in units outside your own.
For example, a friend who is a department chair at a small liberal-arts college in the South observed that all of its partner accommodations are handled completely and centrally within the president’s office. The president is the only one who interviews the partner candidate and decides yea or nay. At the other extreme, I once worked at a major university where hiring an academic spouse was a decentralized, many-part process with literally dozens of ratifying (or rejecting) constituencies and players.
Say you are running a search and your top candidate asks if the university can find a position for her husband. You must acquaint yourself with what you will need to do — and who you will have to approach — to make it happen. Your department may have a different set of rules on partner accommodations than the department you are hoping will hire the husband. This gets even trickier if the partners are in disciplines housed in two different colleges at your university. In your college, a vote to approve a partner hire may occur at the departmental level, while the other college may not vote at all and instead just advise the dean about the partner’s scholarly strengths and weaknesses.
A further wrinkle: Campus operating procedures and bureaucracies change over time. At my university, we recently streamlined our dual-hire process to clarify the various responsibilities, approvals required, and expectations. So even if you have negotiated a successful partner accommodation before, the process may be different, slightly or greatly, the next time. Be prepared to do some homework and bring yourself up to speed on the latest rules.
Find out the short- and long-term costs of the partner hire — and who will pay. A dual hire means two salaries and two of everything else a new colleague needs. Whose budget will the money come out of for the second hire? At some institutions, for example, the central administration pays the salary of the partner, while the departmental budget covers that person’s health-insurance and other benefits.
In this series David D. Perlmutter writes about pursuing a career in academic administration and about surviving and thriving as a leader – whether you are a chair a dean a provost and or any of the positions in between and beyond.
Until very recently at my university, the standard “deal” for partner accommodation was that the central administration would front two years’ worth of salary — plus health insurance, retirement, and other benefits — to the department hiring the partner. After two years, the department would be responsible for all of those salary and benefits costs. Under the new system, departments can stretch out the funding, getting half of the partner’s salary from the central administration over four years.
Even more potential obstacles arise if either of the partners are in fields requiring major start-up expenses.
Suppose you are the dean of a college of arts and want to hire an art historian. At most universities, the start-up funds required for a faculty position in the humanities are modest — perhaps a computer or travel expenses to academic conferences. But what if the art historian’s partner, to everyone’s delight, is an accomplished biologist? The latter’s lab start-up costs can exceed hundreds of thousands of dollars. Hence the imperative that all the costs of a dual hire — not just for Year 1 but long term — be meticulously enumerated, defined, negotiated, and confirmed in writing.
Identify what the partners truly want — and where they are willing to compromise. Because hiring involves humans as well as impersonal rules and procedures, there are risks of miscommunication and misunderstanding. Before you set out on the intricate, expensive, and perhaps politically risky journey of partner hiring, ascertain what they (as individuals) really want.
First, speak to the partners separately. In particular, newcomers to the faculty profession may never have had a candid and clear conversation about their options as a partner hire, and don’t fully understand how to look out for their own best interests. To take one example, a chair of a social-science department once told me that its prospective hire said, “My partner doesn’t need a tenure-track position; a full-time lecturer teaching post is fine.” Later, however, the chair got a call from the head of the department that was interviewing the partner. That department head was worried because the partner was insisting, “I want to be on the tenure track; I am focused on research.”
Second, to the best of your knowledge, be forthright about the options and the limitations. I have seen overenthusiastic administrators promise a partner accommodation — and even detail it in writing — only to have it fail to materialize. Instead, tell the couple what you know and inventory the possibilities, but don’t overcommit. Say something like: “I promise you will get full consideration from the [potential hiring department] and that the position, if offered to you, will be funded, but I can’t guarantee what their resolution will be.”
Lastly, before you start negotiating with the various campus stakeholders, find out what the partners — again, individually and together — are willing to accept if their optimal scenario does not pan out. What are their deal breakers? I would rather be told ahead of time, “If he doesn’t get a position at this salary, I won’t come,” than be surprised by that later.
Put a step-by-step plan in writing. Once you have a clear view of the process and its goals, map it out for yourself and anyone else involved, including the partners. For each action, identify the “approver” — that is, who needs to sign off (verbally or on an actual form) for you to proceed to the next step.
In my college, if we wanted to propose the hiring of a job candidate’s partner who would also join our college, our first act would be to petition the provost. As dean (assisted by the relevant department chair and my associate dean for academic affairs), I would send a memo to the provost requesting (a) approval to initiate an “opportunity hire” and (b) projected funding we would need for the hire from the provost’s partner-accommodation pool. If, however, the partner was a scholar in a field outside of my college, I would work with the dean and relevant department chair of the second college to craft the proposal to the provost (assuming they were in favor of the hire).
I find it extremely useful to annotate the road map with possible queries, concerns, or even opposition to the partner hire. In one case, in proposing a partner hire at a previous university, I knew this person’s potential new home department was short of office space. So before I called the department chair, I first talked with higher-ups about potential locations for the candidate’s office.
In short, if you sweat the details before starting down the partner-accommodation road, it will go more smoothly.
An academic-partner hire — in positive terms, a “second hire opportunity” — can be a great boon to an academic program and to the couple. Further, the holistic needs of faculty members are key to recruiting and retaining the best people. But partner accommodation is beset by roadblocks, so getting a lay of the bureaucratic pathways and possible pitfalls is required. Then the real work can begin: executing the plan to achieve a win-win outcome. I’ll explore best practices on that front in Part 2.
