If you’ve been involved in faculty hiring, you’ve no doubt experienced moments when the mood suddenly shifts from warm to awkward. Like during an interview dinner with a prospective hire when the candidate looks around, coughs, hesitates, and finally gets up the nerve to say:
“Well, I wasn’t sure whether to bring this up or not, but I’m getting married next month, and my fiancé is a doctoral student in our field. In fact, he will graduate the year after me. We really want to work at the same institution.”
What happens next varies from campus to campus. The reaction might be positive (a dean at the dinner promises that a partner hire is “a sure thing, just a formality”), negative (the option gets shut down with a terse, “He will have to apply for an open position, just like you did”), and all points in between.
No surprise that job candidates can be hesitant to ask for a partner or spousal accommodation, out of fear that the request might ruin both of their job chances. And sometimes they are right: If the institution has budget problems or has had bad experiences with partner hiring, or feels it is prestigious enough not to need to offer any help, then asking for a position on the campus for your spouse may very well hurt your own candidacy. But of course not making the request could mean a missed opportunity.
In recent months, I have been focusing the Administration 101 column on the complexities of partner/spousal hires from the institution’s perspective. However, I would be remiss if I didn’t switch the focus to the candidates — and especially to the partner being “accommodated,” who is usually the one taking a career risk in these arrangements — and make some suggestions about how to navigate this special circumstance of candidacy.
What type of position do you, as the partner, really want? Make that decision and then state it clearly, including to your better half.
Let’s take the scenario I cited above but fast forward a month. You are the fiancé and your partner does, indeed, receive an offer after that pleasant dinner. The department chair or dean says the university can create a second position for you — however, you will have to go through the regular hiring process of interviews, job talk, and research/teaching demo. At any point of that process, the faculty or administration may reject your appointment.
Your first step should be self-assessment, followed by candid communication with your partner. Dual hiring does not necessarily mean that both positions in the deal will have the same terms: Your salary may be lower and your teaching load higher than your partner’s. So read the fine print. Are you being offered a tenure-track position or a contingent one? Is the job research-oriented or teaching-focused? Is it a staff position? Or something else altogether?
Equally crucial: What exactly do you want? There may be, especially for new couples, a moment of truth when the two of you realize that you have very different professional and personal ambitions from the ones both of you had assumed you shared.
This frank conversation is necessary but can also be stressful and traumatic. A professor in the humanities described to me how it was only after she landed a tenure-track job offer — complete with a partner accommodation on the table — that she had “the talk” with her then-girlfriend (who also was in graduate school). The latter admitted, now that a decision was nigh, that she hated academe and wanted to work in the private sector.
Their relationship survived, but some don’t. An imminent partner accommodation can spark all sorts of candid revelations about where each of you prefers to live and work, on what type of campus, and in what kind of position. The point is: Now is not the time to live up to someone else’s career dreams or assumptions. Be clear about your own and whether the partner accommodation — if and when it’s offered — is a good match for you.
Agree on realistic timing for the advancement of both your careers. Sometimes two partners finish graduate school or postdocs and go on the job market at the same time. But more often, the careers of the pair do not accelerate on the same track, at the same pace.
I’ve seen academic couples in which the partners are at different ends of the doctoral-training pipeline, or one is committed to a long-term postdoc while the other is unemployed. Life may also play a role: I was involved in recruiting one faculty couple that had just adopted several foster children and decided they couldn’t both start tenure-track positions simultaneously.
So even if you negotiate two positions on the same campus: Are both of you ready — professionally — for the positions you are being offered? Will accepting a position you are not ready for just set you up for failure? Should you negotiate for a short-term gig, with the opportunity to shift into a tenure-track position in a few years?
Let’s return to our hypothetical: You as the fiancé will have your Ph.D. in hand in the next hiring season. But what if your data collection is slower than you had expected? What if your adviser changes jobs, leaving you mentorless for a few semesters? Or, crazy as it sounds, what if a global pandemic hits? You can’t anticipate every potential problem, but you can arrange a few contingencies with the hiring institution. For example, in our scenario, you and the institution might agree that you will be allowed to apply for a position on the campus “upon completion of my doctorate,” rather than attaching a specific date.
What will you settle for if you can’t get exactly what you want? The dream scenario: A university offers your partner a tenure-track position, and creates a second tenure-track opening for you that suits your background and qualifications. The reality: A great opportunity often materializes for only one of you.
When an institution creates a position for a candidate’s partner, that’s just the beginning. There’s no guarantee that you will get the job. The way the process works at my university, and many others, is that you as the partner have to go through the normal hiring process and convince the faculty and administration that you’re a valuable hire, too.
What happens if you get an unhappy phone call, telling you that your spouse has a job offer but you don’t (for any number of reasons)? If that moment comes, what will you (both) say? Will you both just walk away? Will your partner accept the position while you look for employment elsewhere?
Go through every contingency and decide, “What will we do if X happens?” A partner couple at a California university told me they “had been promised by everybody” that they would both start tenure-track positions in the same semester. But bureaucratic fumbling and budget constraints led the university to backtrack on the second tenure-track job. Instead, it offered the partner an adjunct appointment for a year, and then the chance to start a full-time position the following year — “pending budget approvals.” The couple ultimately decided to walk away.
Develop contingency plans for every state of the negotiation — not just for the initial deal-making phase but for what you are willing to accept if those terms fall through.
Handle your end of the process on your own. Faculty partners must establish intellectual and professional identities independent of each other (with some exceptions, such as when the couple collaborates on research or shares a lab). Yes, you may get in the door because of who you married. But once you’ve been invited to apply for a position, you must prove yourself on your own. This is good for you, your relationship, and your institution.
Don’t let an intermediary, even if it’s your partner, represent your interests. Ask to speak with the hiring administrator, such as the department chair or the dean. Work directly with the search committee. Think of it as going solo after someone gives your kayak a push-off.
Be the best candidate — as if no partner process existed. That sounds like obvious advice, right? Unfortunately, I’ve seen enough cases in which partners mistakenly assume that hiring both of them is a sure thing since we want to hire one of them (the original candidate being recruited). But at institutions like my own, where there is a hiring protocol and procedure for partner accommodations, it’s entirely possible that things will not work out.
The safest bet is to proceed as if no partner existed. Follow all the basics of being an ace candidate:
- Tailor your application materials to the institution, the unit, and especially the position.
- Show that you have done your research on who your potential colleagues are, what they have accomplished, and what their ambitions are.
- Note places where you think you would be a good fit (in terms of research, teaching, or service) with the institution’s existing or planned programs.
Avoid mentioning your partner unless somebody else does. Then, as politely as you can, redirect the conversation back to your candidacy.
It is possible you might step on a landmine. Some faculty members may state their opposition to partner hiring. Somebody may insist on asking you questions about your partner’s research or personal questions about your relationship. Academic searches are run by imperfect humans, as I noted in an earlier essay about how to handle left-field questions in a job interview. Keep your cool, stay on point, demonstrate that you are a serious candidate, and don’t take anything for granted.
Last February, when I started writing essays about partner hiring, I knew I was traveling across briery pastures and through dark woods. Since then I’ve received a range of responses — from general approval of the practice to sharp insistence that any sort of partner hire is unethical to complaints that these accommodations are not offered to every candidate as a matter of course. Several readers have also raised issues of gender, sexuality, marital status, and other factors in whether a partner accommodation is tendered or completed.
As I’ve always said: The partner-accommodation process can be both a bureaucratic procedure and a political gauntlet. Partners cannot control the operating procedures and pre-existing biases of institutions, cultures, and people. But if you are part of a dual-career couple, you can and should make the best case for yourselves, separately and together.
