In Defense of Spousal Hiring

In a recent column, “Joseph Kay,” who identifies himself as chairman of an English department of around 40 faculty members, asks a “lingering” question: How many married couples can a single department happily accommodate?

He decides, arbitrarily, that the most his own department should hire is one or two couples. Since the column began with a teaser saying that he had recently had the opportunity to hire a third couple, we might conclude that the poor saps who were “one too many” were left out in the cold.

I am the “trailing” half of a married couple in an English department at a large research university. When my wife and I got here, we were couple No. 8 if you include the non-tenure-track faculty members in the department. If you only consider those on the tenure track, we were couple No. 4.

And that’s only counting the academic couples in which both partners teach in English. The number rises much higher if you take into account all of the faculty members whose spouses or partners teach in other departments on the campus.

Clearly, my university has a proactive spousal-hiring policy that is intended to attract and retain high-quality faculty members. I would like to discuss the benefits of spousal hiring, as well as some of the problems, in the hope of rebutting Professor Kay, who seems more concerned with the effort that spousal hiring requires from him as an administrator than in the long-term health of his department.

In broad terms, Kay is concerned about how the presence of “too many” couples will affect department governance. But any chairman who thinks more about the political effects of a hire rather than how it will affect a department’s mission of research and teaching is not only making an unfair judgment on the candidates but calling into question every hire over which he has presided.

Part of the problem, Kay argues, is the lack of an explicit policy on spousal hiring at his institution and in the profession at large. Policies are good things. At my university, the administration sets aside a pot of money each year for “spousal accommodation.” My department’s policy states that spouses will receive special attention in the hiring process, so long as they meet our standards of teaching and research. Our policy puts things on the table, but it wouldn’t help Professor Kay, whose Machiavellian musings seem to favor far more proscriptive rules.

Kay’s description of the “primary problem” created when a single department hires both partners of an academic couple, is laughable: “Would we be hiring two individuals, or two individuals acting as one?” he asks.

The gist of his concern is that spouses will care more about one another than about the department’s welfare. But it’s been my experience that couples within a department have generally been even more committed to departmental success than others. That’s because if the climate in the department turns sour, couples have few options. They can’t easily find two jobs elsewhere.

I confess I do, indeed, hold views similar to those of my spouse on faculty governance, departmental policies, and curricular reform. But my wife isn’t the only one I usually agree with in the department.

Professor Kay believes that the presence of too many couples can create political problems in a department. But the real political problems result from the perception that there is funny business going on when a department’s faculty includes academic couples.

A couple on the winning side of a departmental debate is suddenly viewed with suspicion by those on the losing side. A successful couple may be viewed with resentment by colleagues having trouble managing the tenure track themselves. More than once colleagues have told me that I am at an unfair advantage because my spouse is in my department: “Since you can talk about your scholarship with her, that gives you extra time with your research.”

But perception isn’t reality. It’s often just sour grapes.

Kay’s suggestion that a married couple of faculty members “will vote as one” in hiring and tenure decisions is offensive and based, I dare say, on his own perception rather than fact.

He worries that a tenure candidate who has somehow offended one member of a couple will wind up with two negative votes come promotion time. But what kind of department does he run? In my department, which has a perhaps too robust sense of free discussion of all issues, personal slights would never result in a negative tenure or reappointment vote. We award tenure to people with good teaching and scholarship, regardless of whether we like them or not.

Professor Kay then offers some advice to single graduate students that he admits is “gratuitous” but that I found offensive: Don’t fall in love with someone in your field. I myself have offered that advice to new graduate students in my department -- as a joke.

My wife, who is not only in my department but in my same small program, has enriched my life beyond words. We spent nearly 10 years looking for positions in the same university and have become, through those efforts, recognized for our scholarship and our teaching. Perhaps I have what some colleagues might call “unfair advantage” in having such a wonderful person to talk to about our children, as well as about scholarship, but it’s petty of Professor Kay to resent our lives.

Much of my ire toward his column stems from the section labeled “Speak Up Sooner.” Under the guise of offering advice to job seekers, he offers his wish to circumvent laws and effective practice when a married couple goes on the job market. Kay directs applicants to let a university know sooner rather than later whether a spousal accommodation will be sought.

Here is the kicker: “Affirmative-action guidelines should be changed to require a candidate needing a spousal or partner hire to say so in the application letter or during the initial interview.” Is it possible that Professor Kay wrote that merely to stir up trouble? Is it a Swiftian “modest proposal”?

Taking a candidate’s marital status into account in hiring is justly forbidden by law and best practices alike. Faculty members are hired to work in departments. Kay demonstrates here an inability to separate what we’re hired for -- teaching, scholarship, and service -- from extraneous issues of politics and his own difficulties as chairman.

He contends that “only the department knows how many positions it can legitimately ask the dean for, as well as how many couples it can accommodate.”

Really? The chairman of my department told my wife that it wouldn’t be possible to hire me after he offered her the advertised position. She, in turn, let him know that not only did I exist but I wanted a job, too. They went back and forth for a couple of days, and my wife finally asked the chairman to ask the dean for an extra position.

It turns out that the dean liked my CV, understood the future of hiring in my field, and was able to offer the department a line if it wished to hire me as well. Moral of the story: The head of the department doesn’t always know how many couples it can accommodate.

By the way, Professor Kay, the decision to hire a candidate’s spouse never lies with the candidate. A department can always say “no” when a candidate requests a spousal accommodation. What is, and should remain, in the candidate’s power is the release of information irrelevant to the requirements of the advertised faculty position.

I myself took off my wedding ring the last time I went on the market when my wife and I were in positions in different locations. I did that not to “mislead” interviewing departments, as Kay suggests, but to protect my privacy. My marital status -- and my sexual orientation, and other personal details -- were my business. I never lied, because no one ever directly asked me whether I was married. But during interviews, I made sure to act equally interested when the conversation turned to local nightlife as when it focused on area public schools.

I acknowledge that spousal hires pose genuine difficulties, and they should not be minimized or papered over. They should be dealt with. Here are the most important issues I have seen arise:

The hiring process goes more easily for one couple than for another. Some hires are more contentious than others, depending on the field and on faculty interests. The couple going through the more difficult process can resent the couple hired more easily. The “poorly treated” pair may retreat and resent departmental processes more generally.

I don’t think that is a different situation from the sour grapes of any individual faculty member who feels mistreated or overlooked. But, as Kay reminds us, two bitter people are twice as bitter as one.

A department’s policy in support of spousal hiring can embitter colleagues whose spouses weren’t hired by other departments. That has been the thorniest issue for us. My department -- which is, like Professor Kay’s, relatively large -- can absorb spouses not only from within but from other departments. I

In the past several years we’ve hired to tenure-track positions the spouses of several sought-after faculty members in other departments, including one in geography. But when the tables were turned, and we needed the geography department to offer a position to the spouse of one of our colleagues, geography told us no.

We’re a small department, its members said. Geography was worried (as Kay points out) that accepting a spousal hire now would mean it could lose a faculty line it really wants to fill down the road. Geography didn’t need the spouse’s speciality, and the message came through loud and clear that the spouse wasn’t up to snuff.

In my view, spouses should be accommodated across departments as well as within them. Geography is not playing fair. The spouse we want geography to hire has publications and a recent Ph.D. from a top program. Our faculty would never hold it against the spouse geography asked us to hire but, at the same time, I would argue against making any future “deals” with geography in terms of spousal hiring. I believe a department should hire a spousal candidate even if it has no need for the specialty, so long as the candidate meets or surpasses its standards.

Conflicts of interest are mishandled. Some states have nepotism laws. And even if there are no such laws, all credentials and procedures must be in order so that both members of the couple are evaluated independently, and so that an administrator will never have direct supervisory capacity over his or her spouse. If you are the chair, and your spouse is in the department, you must recuse yourself from reappointment, tenure, and salary decisions regarding your partner. That is tricky. But the difficulty in making it work properly is far outweighed by the benefits the partners will bring, if they are both well qualifed.

An underqualified spouse receives tenure. A department I know of hired a married couple. The female professor did everything she was supposed to, and her tenure case went smoothly.

But her husband, who was coming up for tenure the following year, was in trouble. His teaching and service work were fine, but his research was not up to snuff. At the last minute he secured a contract for his book, but it would not be published until a year after the tenure decision. At some places that would be OK but this particular department had an (informal) policy that only printed work would count toward tenure.

A friend in that department said he reluctantly voted to grant tenure to the slacking professor. My friend disagreed with the department’s “in print” policy and thought the book was coming from a good press. Besides, my friend said, he liked his colleague, even if he showed no real promise of continuing research. They could talk about sports together.

My friend admitted, however, that he would have voted no if the guy’s wife hadn’t already received tenure. The vote went in favor of the slacker, who was well liked.

The kicker? It was the wife who had initially been the “trailing” spouse, and the husband the highly sought recruit.

I honestly can’t say how I would have voted in that situation, which, I fear, could weaken tenure standards for all faculty members. Tenure should be something you earn while you are an assistant professor, not something you are granted because you happened to get hired at an institution based on good credentials out of graduate school.

In that situation, the goals of meritocracy seemed to be at odds with spousal hiring. But I do not believe that is generally the case, and we should not damn a policy because a small number of people have taken advantage of it in appropriately.

Professor Kay, though, focuses on what I would see as the exceptions rather than the rule. Furthermore, his focus on “political” concerns reveals him to be more concerned with personality than substance. Does he really spend his time worrying about how a married couple will vote in a hiring decision? Does he have other ways of dealing with cabals within departments between unmarried people who seem to “vote as one”?

Three excellent institutions wooed my wife. Two of them made tenure-track offers

to me, as well (after vetting my materials and seeing what kind of person they would be getting). The “bar” at both universities was whether I would, on my own merits, have been a finalist for a position in my subfield had it been advertised. That seems reasonable.

In the end, my spouse and I accepted offers from the university that seemed most welcoming to us as a couple as well as open to the teaching and research we wanted to accomplish. I’m sure there are people in my department who wish we hadn’t been hired, but they would have been equally distressed with us had we been hired individually.

Alas, Professor Kay’s views are all too common: I attended a meeting of college administrators last summer and was surprised to hear many negative remarks regarding spousal hiring --some of the criticism coming from academics who were gay, single, or could otherwise not benefit directly from the practice.

Some well-spoken and heartfelt opposition to spousal hiring gave me food for thought. And as I’ve acknowledged, genuine problems can arise from spouses being in the same department (or university) -- just as they can arise from any number of personal situations that faculty members bring with them when they are hired or develop afterward.

Professor Kay believes the solution to those tensions is to limit the number of academic couples that any one department can hire. I believe the solution is to encourage the hiring of such couples, including same-sex ones, and to apply your spousal-hiring policy as fairly as you would any other.