To lure top professors to this somewhat isolated Midwestern town, the University of Missouri often hires two by two.
For academic couples, landing two faculty jobs on one campus is a dream. For the university, the hiring strategy is an effort to establish an ideal workplace, one where professors are as happy in the lab as they are at home—in part because they are relieved of the common academic burden of a commuter marriage.
But the practice of hiring couples can create a tangled web of relationships that overwhelms an academic department, infusing it with a couple’s worst personal drama. Here, a contentious divorce and a bitter tenure dispute turned the philosophy department into a battleground, with shouting matches, allegations of extramarital affairs, and even charges of sexual harassment brought by an adjunct against her own faculty husband.
“Academic couples in the same department can be heaven and hell,” says Philip Robbins, an associate professor of philosophy who split up with his wife, a former adjunct instructor in the department who charged him with sexual harassment—something he denies. “It’s wonderful if you can get two jobs in the same place, but when it goes wrong, it can go very, very wrong.”
Like many academic departments here, and nationwide, the philosophy department is full of faculty members with spouses either in the department or elsewhere at the university. Twelve of the department’s 17 tenured and tenure-track professors are married to other faculty members or professional employees on the campus. Four of those are married to others in the department. Nearly every faculty search, it seems, ends up involving a professor with a spouse or partner who needs a job.
Just this year, the department hired two young philosophers, a married couple, when it had been looking for only one. To make the deal work, university administrators provided a portion of the salary to hire the female philosopher using a fund meant to help diversify the faculty, since women are underrepresented in the discipline.
“You have to do a lot of negotiating, and begging, and pleading,” says Robert N. Johnson, chairman of the philosophy department. “Once you decide you want to hire someone, you want to get them, and if that means solving a two-body problem, that’s what you have to do.”
When an academic department here wants to offer a job to a candidate with an academic spouse, the university frequently creates a brand-new job. While Missouri has no official policy on hiring couples, the administration often pays a portion of the spouse’s salary for the first two years from a special “bridge” fund; then it is up to the department where the spouse lands to pick up the tab. Professors say the understanding here is that departments should be prepared to take on a partner and, in return, another department will do the same for them down the line.
“We in the Midwest, who are on the way to nowhere, have problems persuading people on the coasts to live here,” says Andrew Melnyk, who served as chairman of philosophy before Mr. Johnson.
Indeed, other campuses located in regions where they are the only research university typically follow practices similar to Missouri’s when it comes to spousal hiring. Institutions in larger cities with many other universities nearby are not as quick to accommodate couples. The same goes for departments at the very top of the prestige scale, where every faculty job is filled by an international search of the best researchers in the field.
More than a third of research-university faculty nationwide have other academics as partners, and of those, nearly 40 percent are coupled with someone who works in the very same department. The data come from a 2006 study of 9,000 research-university professors by Stanford University’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research. They show that more women than men are part of an academic couple; 40 percent of female faculty members are, compared with 34 percent of males.
It’s not uncommon for professionals in other fields to become partners: Half of female doctors marry other doctors, studies show. But, unlike in academe, there is usually more than one place in town for dual-career partners in the same profession to find work. As more women pursue doctoral degrees, the number of academic couples nationwide is expected to rise. Graduate school is a natural mating ground for people who spend years studying a discipline they are passionate about alongside their intellectual peers at precisely the time in their lives when many are also looking for love.
“This new generation of scholars seems to be partnering earlier, and they are both interested in finding successful careers,” says Andrea Rees Davies, director of programs and research at the Clayman Institute.
“It’s wonderful if you can get two jobs in the same place, but when it goes wrong, it can go very, very wrong.”
Jeffrey L. Harrison, a professor of law at the University of Florida, has written about the pros and cons of hiring academic couples on his blog, Class Bias in Higher Education. Hiring a couple to work in one department can bring personal problems into the workplace, he says. And the risks of something going wrong are greater if the couple is hired pretenure. “I think you are rolling the dice when you hire untenured couples, on how it will play out,” he says. “You’re risking a real soap opera if one gets tenure and the other doesn’t.”
Creating jobs for spouses without a search means that other qualified Ph.D.'s are missing out. At Missouri, though, there seem to be few people willing to criticize the practice. Perhaps that’s because practically everyone here is married to someone else. Since Columbia is headquarters to few major industries, it can be challenging for even the nonacademic partners of professors to find work. So the university often finds jobs on its own campus for lawyers, accountants, journalists, and medical personnel.
As dean of arts and science here, Michael J. O’Brien is one of the chief engineers behind the university’s practice of hiring couples. He has been married to two women at the university himself (his first wife died in 2005). He recalls a time a few years ago when the mathematics department alone had five faculty couples, which meant that 10 of its 40 professors were married to others in the department.
“We don’t lose people because of the couple issue,” says Mr. O’Brien. “Hiring couples is the best strategy to get great people.”
The university is aware that hiring couples can create conflicts, he says. “But our experience has been, in the vast majority of cases where we do partner accommodations, they’ve been highly successful. Without accommodations, we wouldn’t have attracted some of the best minds that we have.”
Over all, 22 percent of Missouri’s tenured and tenure-track faculty members, or 488 people, have a spouse or partner either on the faculty or within the rest of the university’s employee ranks. Of those, 10 percent of Missouri’s professors are married to other professors here.
While the philosophy department at Missouri has gained some top hires because of the couple quotient, it has also lost some for the same reason. In 2011, it landed Christopher Pincock, a talented scholar in a rare subfield, the philosophy of mathematics. Faculty members here acknowledge it may have been hard for the department to attract Mr. Pincock if he hadn’t been interested in moving from Purdue University to join his wife, Tansel Yilmazer, whom Missouri’s College of Human Environmental Sciences had recruited a couple of years earlier. Eighteen months after he arrived, though, Mr. Pincock was gone when he and Ms. Yilmazer both got jobs at Ohio State University.
The department also lost Brian Kierland, who had followed his partner to Missouri in 2003, a couple of years after she got a job teaching Russian here. But he returned to his hometown and Boise State University in 2008, a few years after they split up.
Mr. Johnson says that over all, adding faculty spouses to the mix has been good for the department. “One of the hardest things to get as a young faculty member is feedback,” says the chairman, who is himself married to the interim director of Missouri’s master’s program in public health. Spouses provide built-in colleagues to discuss one another’s work.
Hiring academic couples, he adds, has also broadened the philosophy department’s coverage of the discipline.
But the practice has also left deep scars. “Even if a couple gets along fine, if there is a problem in their family life it’s going to impact the department doubly as opposed to if you just had one of them as a member,” says Peter Vallentyne, a philosophy professor here.
He still believes that hiring couples generally holds more pluses than minuses, but Mr. Vallentyne doesn’t deny the costs. “If you ever thought there was a good chance that what’s happened here would happen when you hired a couple,” he says, “you’d never be in favor of it.”
When the department made Mr. Robbins an offer in 2007, it had just lost its top candidate for the job: A scholar it tried to attract by also offering his wife a tenure-track post. The couple took jobs at the University of Oxford instead.
During the interview process, Mr. Robbins hadn’t mentioned a spouse, but when the department extended him a tenured offer, he asked for a job for his wife, Sara Bernal, then a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at Rutgers University. The dean quickly agreed to put up $24,000 for Ms. Bernal to teach four courses a year for two years as an adjunct instructor, and the couple accepted the jobs, moving to Columbia from Washington University in St. Louis. The hope, says Mr. Melnyk, who was the department chairman at the time, was that Ms. Bernal would quickly finish her dissertation and the university would offer her a tenure-track post.
Mr. Robbins and Ms. Bernal met in a course on logic, when she was an undergraduate and he a graduate student at the University of Chicago. He is seven years older and earned his doctorate in 2000. During most of the roughly 10 years they’d been married before landing here, Ms. Bernal had been following him to academic appointments—in Mexico City, in Vermont, and in St. Louis. When they arrived at Missouri’s Strickland Hall, where the philosophy department is based, they had a 2-year-old son and a rocky relationship. Ms. Bernal was overwhelmed by motherhood, she says now, and depressed by the dim prospect that she’d ever finish her doctorate and have a scholarly career of her own.
It didn’t take long for the marriage to unravel. In July 2009, close to two years after they’d arrived, Ms. Bernal was arrested for shoplifting, a habit she said she’d acquired as she became more and more despondent. Shortly after that, she wrote an account of shoplifting roughly based on her own experiences that she gave to Mr. Robbins in the hopes, she says, that it would get his attention and save their marriage. But instead, in October 2009, Mr. Robbins asked for a divorce.
Over Thanksgiving the following month, Ms. Bernal spent the holiday out of town with her son and another man. When she later told Mr. Robbins, he was livid and, according to both of their accounts, he told her: “I know a lot of people, and I will talk to them, and you will never have a career in philosophy.”
“Each of us envisioned the possibility that one of us would get a job and the other would follow that one around for awhile, or maybe forever.”
Ms. Bernal says she was concerned enough for her safety after that remark that when she returned to Columbia, she spent a couple of hours at a local shelter with her son. Mr. Robbins says “she had no reasonable cause” for concern.
It was after this episode that Mr. Robbins began circulating the story on shoplifting to some of his friends and colleagues, including Mr. Melnyk, with the implication that Ms. Bernal was both unstable and unfit to teach. She fired back by e-mailing Mr. Melnyk accusations of an improper relationship she claimed Mr. Robbins had had with a female undergraduate while he was an assistant professor at Washington University. Mr. Robbins says the accusations of impropriety are untrue.
As their conflict escalated, both Mr. Robbins and Ms. Bernal used their department chairman as a referee, complaining to Mr. Melnyk about what the other had said in texts and e-mail messages and asking him to make the other stop. Mr. Melnyk did manage to barter a fragile truce for a while, asking the two not to contact each other during work hours. But they eventually violated the agreement, and they both began complaining to Mr. Melnyk again.
A pivotal moment came in the spring of 2010 when Ms. Bernal visited Mr. Robbins’s office to retrieve some books and stepped on a table in her stocking feet. He told her to get her “germy feet” off his furniture, they both said, and threatened to call campus security if she didn’t leave.
Ms. Bernal knew their colleagues had heard the shouting. “I marched right down the hall to Andrew’s office,” she says, “and said, ‘This behavior is against the rules and I’m going to do something about it!’”
In the fall of 2010, Ms. Bernal filed a grievance with the university, accusing her estranged husband of sexual harassment and the university of failing to maintain a positive work environment.
By then, however, her academic appointment at Missouri had expired, and a university panel threw out her complaint because she was no longer an employee. Ms. Bernal also filed a similar complaint with the Missouri Commission on Human Rights, which investigated and gave her the right to sue, but found no evidence of her charges. After a bitter custody battle, the couple’s divorce became official last year.
Mr. Robbins says he regrets bringing his marital problems into the office, but with both him and his wife working on the same corridor, it was nearly impossible to avoid. “When something like this is going on, you can’t ever get away from it,” he says. “It’s one thing to have someone screaming at you at home, but then you’ve got it at the office, too. It is very easy to go on quarreling with someone.”
Mr. Melnyk says he was shocked at the couple’s hostility. “I tried to tell them to stop, that two wrongs don’t make a right, but I was really powerless to remedy the situation,” he says. Using her accusations of harassment to punish him would have been contrary to university policy. “Being mean to one’s soon-to-be ex-wife doesn’t fall into any categories.”
Mr. Melnyk has been married for 25 years to a woman who is an adjunct assistant professor of English here and who previously worked as an associate director of the university’s honors college. But nothing had prepared him for being pressed into duty as a marriage counselor.
“I know way too much about this divorce,” he says.
He successfully kept the rancor from affecting the department’s students and most of the other faculty members. But sometimes there wasn’t much he could do to keep the dispute from spreading. In one case, for example, Mr. Robbins asked another professor to exclude Ms. Bernal from a philosophy workshop, which the other professor agreed to do until Mr. Robbins changed his mind. Ms. Bernal found out about it when Mr. Robbins copied her on an e-mail message to the other professor, retracting his request that she be excluded.
Ms. Bernal says the dispute with Mr. Robbins cost her a career in philosophy. She has dropped her plans to earn a Ph.D. and is now planning to pursue a medical degree. “If I had had some kind of ongoing professional community in Columbia, as opposed to a department in which I no longer wanted to step foot,” she says. “I’d have hung on with more determination.”
If the reverberations from the Robbins-Bernal divorce spilled over into the chairman’s office here, the ramifications of Sara Rachel Chant’s tenure denial went far beyond that. Ms. Chant and her husband, Zachary Ernst, were recruited in 2006 from two faculty jobs at Florida State University. The philosophy department here wooed them with higher salaries, they say. The department also paid to transport Ms. Chant’s horses from Florida and agreed to allow her dog—Alexander, a Great Dane—to accompany her to the campus.
But from the first day they arrived at Missouri, they both say, Mr. Melnyk clashed with Ms. Chant. He offered her one of two philosophy offices located one floor down from the department’s headquarters, in the women’s-studies department. She says he made comments about her body, her clothing, and about how her good teaching evaluations probably were based on her looks, not her accomplishments in the classroom.
“There’s a huge long laundry list of things I’m accused to have done,” says Mr. Melnyk, who denies any allegations of gender bias or harassment. “In some cases, I simply didn’t do these things. In other cases, I did but my motivation wasn’t discrimination and had nothing to do with her gender.”
Mr. Ernst went up for tenure first, in 2008, and got it without a hitch. But when it was Ms. Chant’s turn three years later, the department voted her down. Most of the other decision makers up the line, all the way to the university’s chancellor, agreed with the department’s decision. They said Ms. Chant had failed to design new courses, that her syllabi weren’t detailed enough, and that she had cowritten too many publications with her husband rather than publishing articles she alone wrote in top journals, Ms. Chant says.
To complicate matters, a few years before Ms. Chant came up for tenure she had had an affair with a philosopher outside Missouri, and Mr. Ernst, who was crushed at the time, is said to have told a colleague here that he actually wrote most of his wife’s work. Mr. Ernst now says that’s something he never claimed, but Ms. Chant says she believes that it was a factor in her tenure proceedings.
By the height of Ms. Chant’s tenure battle, a few years after the affair had ended, Mr. Ernst had become a more outspoken advocate for her case than she was herself. He accompanied her to administrators’ offices to wage appeals. And he dashed off a treatise he put on Facebook, accusing the philosophy department of sexism.
“I have a very large, nasty ax to grind with my department,” he wrote in the essay he posted on Facebook. “If you want a good picture of the ax, try to imagine the heaviest, most blunt, blood-soaked ax in the world’s worst horror movie.” The essay was widely circulated on the Internet as an example of difficulties facing women in philosophy and even ended up on New APPS, a blog about art, politics, philosophy, and science.
“This has been very damaging to the reputation of the department,” says Mr. Melnyk, who says several philosophers read Mr. Ernst’s post and made negative comments online about the department.
Ms. Chant filed a grievance in 2012, accusing the department of gender bias, sexual harassment, and of creating a hostile working environment. The university found no merit to her complaints. In a meeting with Missouri’s chancellor, Ms. Chant says, he acknowledged she was a “first-rate” researcher and an “excellent” teacher, but told her he wasn’t sure that would continue. She says she challenged him by presenting a lengthy plan for her future research, and eventually he reversed his original decision and granted her tenure late last year.
Even though both husband and wife now have tenure, securing them lifetime jobs at Missouri, the battle isn’t over.
Ms. Chant, who is working on her research this semester in Florida, editing a collection of essays to be published next year by Oxford University Press and preparing a philosophy talk she’ll deliver this month in Helsinki, filed a lawsuit last month charging the university and the philosophy department with sexual harassment and gender discrimination.
Neither she nor her husband want much to do with their department. Ms. Chant, who will return to Missouri next semester, says, “I am trying to have one last semester which involves as little contact with my colleagues as possible.”
While Mr. Ernst is here teaching classes this semester, he refuses to go to department meetings or speak to his philosophy colleagues. “I don’t take part in any business or functions,” he says. “I’m not friends with any of them, it burned a lot of bridges. As a couple, when something ugly happens, you’re in the same boat.”
Down the hall from the philosophy-department office that Mr. Ernst never comes to are the offices of a brand-new pair of scholars the philosophy department hired this fall. They represent the ideal that Missouri administrators still say defines the majority of couple hires.
The husband and wife are aware of the problems couples here have experienced. But they say that faculty members here assured them that the poor track record of some couples before them didn’t mean they would face the same fate. To Marina Folescu and Alexandru Radulescu, two new Ph.D.'s, the benefits of having two jobs on the same campus overwhelm any downsides and offer a much brighter situation than the alternatives.
“When we were on the job market, panic would set in,” says Ms. Folescu. “Each of us envisioned the possibility that one of us would get a job and the other would follow that one around for awhile, or maybe forever.”
With two equal jobs on one campus, “we don’t have to worry about commuting to and fro,” she says. “Now we can walk to work together and talk philosophy.”
