Academic spousal accommodation in Europe

At French Universities, academic spousal accomodation is not possible. Each position in the public sector is subject to a form of competitive examination. Recruiting a prospective professor’s spouse would mean to actually rig the porcess in a way that would make it cancellable by other candidates to the position.

My current department offered a job to the wife of a prominent academic as part of a package to entice him here. In this department, there are two other spousal couples that I know of where both work in the department – one couple are lowly grad students, not teaching faculty. I have no idea if there is a policy – it was not discussed at my hiring, but I didn’t ask. My previous department definitely did no such thing.

I’ve never heard of such a thing, although I’m not at a level where it would happen. I think the Professor Dobashes may have come as a package, but that was a bit different.

When I was offered a job in Germany I was given to understand that it was highly unusual to find the spouse a job. Still, they moved mountains to do so for my wife, also an academic. The best they managed was to twist the arm of a fellow professor to offer her a temporary job in his research group in the institute where my chair was. In the event it seemed a presumption on my part to make my wife take a temporary job when she was already in an established post on what later came to be called an ‘open-ended’ contract. So here we are, still in England. There’s a little sun today, but rain is expected later.

Great. Now we’ll have a conversation about spousal hires where everyone will worry that some principle of fairness is being violated, blind to the countless other supposed principles of fairness that are voided in the academic (or other professional) hiring process. Academia is, like the rest of the economy, systematically sexist. What this conversation always ends up being about is some tool’s worries about whether or not some woman who gets hired is qualified.

For a very informative, data-based report on dual-career academic couples in the US context, see the Clayman Institute’s (Stanford) report on dual-career academic couples. The report is based on a survey of 13,000 faculty at elite US institutions. Obviously it’s hard to generalize to what happens at the non-elite institutions, but my sense is that most US universities are wrestling with the issue, financially, logistically, and “morally”.

As #8 alludes to, this isn’t a gender neutral issue. Women academics are more likely to be married to other academics or to non-academic professionals than men. There are also still gender differences in the extent to which men and women in dual-career couples prioritize their career over their spouse’s, even given equivalent earnings. (Source: the aforementioned Clayman report.)

In Germany you can get extra money if your spouse is not working.

public sector employers usually have a duty to fill each vacancy on merit.

writing exceptions would be a challenge given the fluidity of modern relationships and the need for evidence.

I have an interesting take on this from two perspectives.

One, my advisor was a spousal hire. At my (private, american, top-tier) university, his wife was a highly sought candidate for a facultty position in the sciences. He (the husband, my advisor), in a different STEM field was given at first a non-tenure-track position, and this was then upgraded to tenure track after I think 2 years of “ok” performance. However, over the next 5 years he did not do well. In fact, he pretty much failed every metric for getting tenure anywhere, much less at a top school. I’ll leave the misery of my personal experience under him out (let’s just say I learned everything I know from negative examples), but he was, essentially, a failure. I was in the extremely awkward position of having to be supportive in public while privately feeling that it would be very wrong to give tenure to someone so ill-qualified (I thought of his future students, chiefly). He was denied, eventually (oh and he divorced the wife, sadly).

My other perspective is as one half of an academic couple. Personally, I am quite envious of how things are done in the medical field where graduate appointments are made in a national “mutual ranking” algorithm and couples can easily be accommodated. I think giving a spousal hire a chance is a reasonable thing to do if they would qualify for the position in the first place – in other words, the spousal connection confers only a slight advantage, and doesn’t place people in positions in which they are likely to fail.

I have also observed that many of the best female minds in my field (the full professors, sought speakers, etc) are married to other professors at the same university. It could be a fluke, or it could be that the “affirmative action” boost of spousal hiring has allowed these women to avoid the glass ceiling.

My other perspective is as one half of an academic couple. Personally, I am quite envious of how things are done in the medical field where graduate appointments are made in a national “mutual ranking” algorithm and couples can easily be accommodated.

One major difference is that in the medical field, good jobs tend to be fairly easy to come by for skilled practitioners (doctors and nurses), while in academia, full-time jobs with benefits are as scarce as hen’s teeth. If there was a good job market for academics, then the “trailing spouse” issue wouldn’t be an issue at all; institutions would be thrilled to get two workers at once. The problem is that we’re creating too many PhDs while simultaneously failing to adequately fund the creation of tenure-track jobs.

There is sometimes another dynamic at play worth mentioning – several American universities outside the top-25 or so have reputations for strategically going after spousal packages because, by hiring them together, they get two scholars who are each better then what they would have gotten if they had filled those same slots with two unrelated people. In other words, the discussion so far has assumed a case with one good scholar and less-stellar spouse where the university tries to accomodate the latter in order to hire the former. The other case is two very good scholars who would independently each get a good job, but are limited by their preference to work in the same place – a situation taken advantage of by lower-ranked schools. In such cases fairness might not be an issue at all.

What David said. In all the cases of spousal hire of which I am aware, (a small sample to say the least), the couples involved were both already tenured at their institutions and alone would have been catches for the hiring institution. To score both was a coup. @Charlie “Do big corporations fix up jobs for their executives’ spouses? Does the diplomatic service of any nation? Do churches take any responsibility for this sort of thing when posting minsters to different livings?” In the US, at least, the answer is yes, all the time.

Following on #18 and #20 – the big difference between academia and other ‘professional’ careers is that most professions don’t have the dynamic of absolute lack-of-control over final destination that academics have, (You go where the the job is. There is no practical option to get a job in “New York” as the market is too competitive for that, and no telecommuting is possible), coupled with the decentralization. If you marry an actuary, you know he/she likely will land in Hartford, New York, or Chicago. 99% of professionals can get a decent job in Hartford, New York, or Chicago. Many professionals are going to have significant problems finding a job in Ithaca, NY (home of Cornell). This problem gets amplified when you get below the top tier, and you are trying to find a position for your spouse in or near Alpine, Texas; Missoula, Montana; or Pullman, Washington (homes of West Texas State University, the University of Montana, and Washington State University, respectively). If the partner is also an academic, the problem is amplified, unless the university makes an effort to find a place for the spouse.

I suspect companies looking for in-demand professionals in out-of-the-way places do accomodate spouses, but companies in major metros probably don’t, as much. I have no data to back up that speculation, though.

To Charlie at 14:
“Am I naive? Am I just (U.K.) parochial?” I don’t know.

“Do big corporations fix up jobs for their executives’ spouses?” Quite often, yes.

“Does the diplomatic service of any nation?” Yes, occasionally.

“Do churches take any responsibility for this sort of thing when posting minsters to different livings?” My knowledge of internal church politics only extends to the RC variety, so any rumours I’ve heard of such things are rather quiet.

I agree that there are some ethical issues, but the benefits, especially for universities in out-of-the-way places are tremendous. In the US, many schools are located in towns where the university is by far the largest employer. If they want to hire someone who will stick around for a long period of time (i.e. not apply to every job under the sun in the first year after starting), they need to find ways to make the place attractive, and a job for a spouse is one way to do that.

An easy way to solve the “fairness” problem would be to give the job to the qualified person who asks the least money.

As an aside, I think the main problem with giving an academic job as a form of “spousal accommodation” is not lack of fairness to other candidates, but the danger of hiring unqualified people (see @17).

Women in academe are substantially more likely to be married to another academic than men are.

*Of course* universities, and private employers, take this into account. At minimum the university will assist in a job search for the spouse – because if you actually want someone to come you don’t get to demand that they live in another city from their spouse or that their spouse quite their job. These demands are a good way to ensure that you don’t lure the senior person that you’re looking for.

A package for a senior hire can frequently involve their being able to bring other researchers, students, or even other junior faculty with them to create a research group. From the point of view of the university it’s also perfectly fair to ask another department if they’re interested in having someone join – in effect, as a target of opportunity. If the spouse is “interesting” to the second department then the university can attract them – and this is usually into a position that would not exist without the senior hire in the first place. Our department has benefited enormously from this, to the loss of other places that didn’t give a damn about such matter.

Universities that do this also tend to have faculty who want to stick around. And it isn’t restricted to academe.

I think if you are shocked to imagine that this could happen, you have not thought about the issue in the right way. It is incredibly inefficient socially for one half of a partnership to be permanently underemployed because of the limitations of the job market. In various sectors, this could be quite difficult to arrange due to legal requirements on a competitive hire process. This may be a valuable rule to implement in general, but specific exceptions for spousal accomodation could be useful as a matter of social justice and, of course, private business are generally under no such obligations. In extremely competitive markets like academia where there are simply not enough jobs for those interested in them, I agree there could be problems of fairness. But if you are considering an administrative position, for example, the idea of having to hire the most qualified person is silly. No metric exists for reliably determing such a person and creating a local opportunity for an adequately qualified person who could definitely find a job somewhere on a consistent basis greatly increases the chances that both partners in a relationship can realize their full potential in the workplace. This is a much more socially optimal outcome and, I think, also very valuable in reaching a less gendered workplace and society. It would be most appropriate for positions where there are enough jobs for qualified applicants generally, but where the liquidity in the job market can be quite limited in a specific locality. Even academic positions could qualify for consideration if you are talking about an accomodation candidate who could definitely get an equivalent position somewhere else in the state but due to the whims of the selection committe and the timing of job openings have only a limited chance of landing whatever job happens to be available at that particular university.

I know of three friends (all at top-tier US institutions, and considered rising stars in their respective STEM areas) who have been hired by top-tier (continental) European institutions in the last few years, and these institutions have also hired their spouses. All spouses are very highly qualified in their own right (one was already tenured, another was tenure-track), but knowing what I do of the tightness of the European academic market, I feel I can safely say that these were “package” hires, rather than all three couples getting lucky and being hired by the same place at the same time (especially given that only one of the six spoke the language of the country they were moving to). The “lead” hire in two of the three cases is a man, in one case a woman. None of the institutions is French.

As to the digression into fairness: I don’t see the practice of spousal hires as it happens in academia as particularly problematic (I am not an academic myself; I am aware of numerous examples of this in the US; and I do believe this happens more in academia than in non-academic areas). Universities often are in out-of-the-way places where chances of spousal employment are limited, so spousal employment is an important competitive point (also, would you rather see the physicist get a leg-up for their spouse and so stay in Ithaca, or would you rather have them go work on Wall Street for many times their academic salary?). And, in all the cases that I am aware of, the spouses were always good enough to be a strongly plausible candidate for the jobs they were offered.

Jim @26

there is no competition so there is no unfairness.

The absence of competition is precisely the source of the unfairness. Somebody getting a job on the strength of their partner’s qualifications is intrinsically unfair to somebody who does not have such a partner, whatever the process (or absence of process) used.

@ marek

Okay. Better then that neither have jobs. This is why I think focusing on the unfairness of partner hires is counter-productive–it encourages the same kind of thinking on display in hostility to public unions: why isn’t your deal as bad mine?

Just to clarify: I simply haven’t seen a case in which a partner hire has been incompetent and/or unqualified and got a position solely based on their partner’s qualifications. Without exception, the partner hires I’ve witnessed have resulted in departments getting two great people instead of one. Since the second line wouldn’t have been created otherwise, it’s an net plus for both the department but also improves (albeit incrementally in each case) the job market more broadly, given that the problem with the job market is the lack of TT positions for all the people qualified for them.

@30: Yes, there are fewer women than men in academe, especially in the sciences where I’m the most familiar with the data. If you’re already facing a substantial gender imbalance you don’t improve matters by de facto applying a much more stringent standard to female scientists.

41. You certainly don’t. But nor do you improve matters by applying a more stringent standard to unmarried women than to female spouses.

(Or what 35 said.)

Could someone tell me whether American universities that engage in spousal hiring do so by having a blanket policy to, say, give preferential consideration to the spouses of all their hires, or just do so to accommodate the spouses of a few select individual star hires?

I have trouble seeing how the former is fair, but the latter seems even more problematic.

It seems to be the case that in the US, lots of schools don’t have a set policy but rather look at the spouse issue on a case by case basis. My department recently lost 2 up and coming mid-level faculty for spousal hire reasons. In one case I don’t really know the story, but in the other, the professor married a grad student in a different but related field, and our university decided her scholarship was too shoddy to try and either make a position or get another dept. to hire her. Of course, he got offered a spousal deal at a very wealthy school trying to build their dept and went there. There is one notorious case at our university where a particularly big name got his spouse (who was his former grad student he left his previous wife for) hired despite less her than stellar scholarship, much to the grumbling of everyone else in the department. There are yet other examples though, of spousal hires where the spouse is a perfectly fine academic and thus not necessarily ‘unfairly’ taking jobs away from other possible candidates. At least at top universities, it seems spousal hires are part of the bargaining that the school does to hire or keep top candidates it really wants.

As for why a university would hire a spouse rather than pay the hotshot more money so the spouse would not have to work, most academic spouses would like to work for many reasons besides money (there’s a reason they went into academica in the first place), so I imagine a place where your spouse was working would be more attractive than a place where your spouse couldn’t get a job even if you made more money.

As the husband of an outstanding female scholar, don’t presume the female trailing spouse. In our instance, it’s likely to be the opposite — assuming it happens at all. Additionally, the logic of “two academic bodies in one place makes for roots” is sound. Were we to land positions in the same uni/college, it would diminish the likelihood of our leaving to near zero. Otherwise we would be constantly searching to find that common location, making for a short tenure at whatever positions we had found.

I have heard of cases like 21 describes (joint hires in 2nd tier universities in out of the way locations) in the UK and across Europe including the Netherlands. I only know of cases where both members of the couple are applying to the same department and thus one head-of-dept can make the decisions, without having to appeal to other departments. My husband & I are both academics but in different fields and hence in different (but commutable) universities.

A few years back I was offered a professorship in the statistics department of a Belgian university. For my partner, who is at a similar level, they could at best arrange a one-year postdoc. Although it was otherwise an attractive offer, we went instead to Canada. (We’ve since moved to the UK, where the large number of universities crammed into a small space makes the two-body problem easier to resolve.)

As for the question raised by many of why academia should be a special case, there are few other professions in which no city in the world has more than a couple of job openings in your field in a year, and most job openings are the only one in that city for several years. This means that academics already need to be exceptionally flexible in deciding where to live, and it is exceptionally difficult even for two equally qualified spouses to independently get hired in the same university, or the same city, given the inevitable randomness in any given academic hire. Two lawyers or doctors or accountants would not have this problem. Again, this is much more of a problem in North America, where the distance from one university to the next can be hundreds of miles.

Academics are often married to other academics for the simple reason that they are in grad school when they are of the age when people tend to find a partner. Almost everyone I knew in grad school was also in grad school. Between that and “birds of feather flocking together” it should be no surprise that this is a recurrent problem.

And as for “unfairness” in academic hiring stemming from considering spousal hires, how is that more unfair than NOT hiring qualified people because of their spouses?

In my case, at least, my wife wasn’t guaranteed a lifetime appointment. She was given a chance to earn one. And the university is not sorry they did. She has been very successful.

(Disclosure: I’m a male “trailing spouse” who first did a postdoc – 8 time zones away from my wife, mind you – then got a TT position at another institution 150 miles away, before being hired in to the same department where my wife had been for the previous 5 years.)

My wife has made the following observation: The fact that she and I both work at the same institution means that both of us are willing to spend more time on campus than would be the case if we worked at different places. (We don’t need to be at home to see each other.) The result is that our institution gets a lot of extra work out of us.

It seems reasonable to assert that those overseeing hiring (in both the corporate and higher-ed worlds) tend to act in what they perceive to be the best interest of their institution. Keeping good employees working productively, whether by means of spousal hires at big universities or fancy cafeterias at Google, is good for the productivity of the institution and therefore justifies the expenditure.

Note that this also places a constraint upon spousal hiring — if an unqualified person is hired, then there is a danger that morale, and hence productivity, will decline.

Note also that certain types of “unfair” actions (e.g. discrimination based on legally protected status, such as race) are illegal in the US, but that there few other legal requirements regarding hiring and “fairness”.

I basically agree with everything Krippendorf said, and highly recommend Londa Schiebinger’s report to which s/he linked above. The data in there about the increased significance of these issues for women and people of color are also worth noting (cf. fig 12 on p. 29 of the PDF).

I would add this to Krippendorf’s observations: Equality of opportunity can mean more than one thing. Perhaps viewed at the individual level, one could argue that such practices are an unfair allocation of scarce opportunities relative to some dubious, perspectivally-bound vision of ‘merit,’ but would anyone really argue that that would be the most substantive way to see this question? Insofar as we are interested in advancing the position of women within the profession — which we should all be — the best way to do that is to make possible a less trying work/family balance in our fields.

It may be that I’m part of an academic couple who has already benefited a bit from such practices and will at some point hope to benefit more, but I think the fairness crowd is way off the deep end here. I may be biased, but I don’t think I’m wrong.

I’m 30, and many of my friends are in such couples. Just anecdotally, it seems like the burden of our bizarre labor market falls heavily on the women, who — having chosen to spend their 20s earning a PhD over having children — are now asked to spend their 30s securing junior faculty positions, often with their partners working elsewhere. The years add up. It’s hard to argue that our profession is meaningfully open to everyone if women have to make enormous sacrifices (that men do not — men’s biological and tenure clocks are not in conflict in the same way) in order to participate. Leveling that difference is a legitimate consideration in hiring, and making this sort of accommodation is probably the most direct way to do that.

Also, Marek’s position @35 is abstract (I’m sorry, “intrinsic”) to the point of meaninglessness. I suppose there are or could be such imbalanced couples — I don’t know any — but are they the ones getting jobs? The trailing partner has been reviewed in some way in all of the partner hire situations I am aware of; I believe such reviews are standard practice.

Also: that some proponents are speaking about this in terms of gender equity does not me we should assume that the female partner in a heterosexual couple would be the trailing spouse. There is data on this in the Stanford report: long story short, the ratio is falling fast, and is now about 3:1.

My university declares the following standard:

“Academic departments and administrative units must conduct a search for all faculty and non-classified positions unless the appointed position is for a year or less. As a general rule, faculty and non-classified positions must be advertised for a minimum of thirty (30) days.”

Yet I know that there are spousal hires.

Lordy.

I have attempted to read the various comments with an open mind, but I can’t help but think there is a awfullot of special pleading going on here. I concede this may partly be because of my British perspective: we don’t have to face the tyranny of travel distances that North Americans do, as someone noted up thread. But all sorts of couples outside academia and on both sides of the Atlantic can be faced with various locational dilemmas at various stages in their careers and it is not in the least obvious to me that the way to resolve these is for one’s partner’s employer to create a job for the other person. If this sort of thing happened in the British civil service, local government, the NHS or the voluntary sector it would be called nepotism and break almost every established HR recruitment procedure I’ve ever read. I really don’t get why academic recruitment should run according to different and lower standards of probity.

Note: I’m not talking about the joint hire of two equally qualified people here, to which , as long as there is open competition for a job, no-one could possibly object. Nor am I unfamiliar with the situation where an organisation struggles so hard to find suitable people with appropriate skills that they take qualified help wherever they can find it. But I do find it difficult to swallow the idea that academics are so very, very different from us mere mortals that different rules of fairness ( or organisational efficiency) should apply to them.

“Piglet, that’s pretty easy to get around. They advertise the position, accept as many applications as they want, and then give the job to the spouse.”

Which is a waste of time for all concerned. Just be honest about it.

.

Just a footnote to the comments that attest to the advantages of spousal hiring and its generally fair application in practice (however it may look in theory to outsiders). It occurs to me that most people from the Netherlands or most other parts of Europe (including Great Britain and Ireland) know in a theoretical way but may not really appreciate the vast size of the U.S. and the huge distances to be travelled, at much expense, by many commuting couples. Add to that the large number of colleges and even major universities located in rural areas without access to efficient air routes (e.g., Cornell, Dartmouth, Oberlin). This is a serious problem where I teach. Attracting talented assistant professors is not a problem, but retaining recently tenured faculty is, as the years of commuting take their toll or as couples begin to have children (which often happens shortly after tenure has been granted). Sometimes the partner elsewhere eventually moves here, but often our colleague leaves to join the partner, who usually is already working in a more urban area where greater job possibilities exist, whether our (now former) colleague is planning to leave academics and venture into the wide world of employment, or is willing to try to pick up whatever academic post she or he can find.

But spousal hiring cannot solve the problem if the partner isn’t an academic or isn’t an academic who would be competitive for a position here, or if their work isn’t relevant to higher education in some other respect. My college has a person in HR who serves as a kind of employment counsellor to partners of faculty (no one insists that they be legally married, btw). Even where retaining a person doesn’t depend on the spouse getting a good job nearby, this service is much appreciated.

All this ultimately serves not only the faculty and partner directly affected but also the college, each department and, most of all, the students.

Again, contra Meredith, this is not a US-only problem. If you are running a European department, and you are hiring globally, it’s very easy to have a majority of your department whose partners are based in other EU and non-EU countries. Of course, if you mostly hire local insiders, the problem is not so intense.

My impression is that EU institutions do not hire much outside of the EU due to strict requirements that they must prove that there are no citizens of EU countries capable of doing the job before they can hire outside the EU. This requirement effectively bans the vast majority of non-EU academics from working at EU institutions. So they are not really hiring globally except for in quite specialized areas. My supervisor at SOAS was an American and there was also an Australian in the Near and Middle East Section of the History Department. But, all the others in the section were EU citizens, British, German, and Italian. My department currently hires globally, but that is only because it is very easy to prove that there are not enough qualified Ghanaians available to fill these positions.

“due to strict requirements that they must prove that there are no citizens of EU countries capable of doing the job before they can hire outside the EU”

That’s way, way less fair than hiring spouses.

Re Salient (@74)

I sense the same kind of assumption that you do, but there are a few particulars about the academic job market that might warrant extreme meritocracy.

1. If universities are free to hire anyone who is qualified to do a job, rather than the person who is most qualified, then the academic job market is essentially random – anyone with a PhD has the same chances of landing a job as anyone else with a PhD. There is no reason to expect that hard work and brilliant research will improve one’s chances. Nobody wants to believe that is the case (although to some extent, it already is). If the academic job market was any good this objection would not be very persuasive, because most people would find a job anyway.

2. One expects universities (and other employers) to make the most out of their opportunity to fill a position by hiring the best-qualified person they can. Why wouldn’t they? Why would they settle for a less-well-qualified person, even if that person could do the job?

If I had to guestimate, I would say that there is something approximating a global market for nearly all tenure track positions at nearly all research universities in OECD countries (with some language constraints, and some/too much insider advantages in some places). The international academic market is not just about “very high powered academics” who are the equivalent of top footie players.

I think spouse hiring can be considered as “in kind” compensation: a candidate, instead of asking for a higher salary, asks that its spouse also gets a job.

If universities are free to hire anyone who is qualified to do a job, rather than the person who is most qualified, then the academic job market is essentially random

Wait, that’s not true. We’re talking about potentially modifying and expanding the set of criteria we use to rank candidates, to include a few other characteristics. We’re not talking about rolling dice.

There is no reason to expect that hard work and brilliant research will improve one’s chances.

With apologies for basically saying the same thing twice, modifying and expanding the set of criteria we use to rank candidates is not the same thing as abandoning perfectly sensible criteria.

It’s needs really doesn’t justify fucking around with the basic fairness rules that apply to the rest of us which are, or should be, about recruiting according to defined competencies in open competition.

As a council rep I’ve gotten the chance to sit in on many of the decision-making meetings of faculty regarding open positions. Every single time there was quick agreement that there weren’t any significant disparities in research quality between the short-listed candidates, and the decision was made entirely on who seemed like they would be the best “cultural fit” at the university/department. While I wasn’t privy (as a grad student) to some of the meetings or conversations, it was pretty clear the judgments at that point were purely qualitative, heavily subjective, and hotly contested between faculty members who felt differently about different candidates. It was pure feeling and competing self-interests at that point.

Saying that hiring practice anywhere is reliably selecting “according to defined competencies in open competition” is ignoring what always happens once you’ve whittled applicants down to a short list of candidates: subjective and purely qualitative judgment of which person you feel most right about. It’s at that late stage most of all where I’m advocating for systematic changes in practice, and pretending that stage doesn’t exist does nobody’s case justice.

“I think spouse hiring can be considered as “in kind” compensation: a candidate, instead of asking for a higher salary, asks that its spouse also gets a job.”

If the relationship between the two deteriorates, would you be happy with the spouse being sacked or made redundant?

@CharlieMcMenamin This isn’t true at all. I’m at Australian university (good, but not Harvard or Yale), and we do all our hiring on the global job market – something of a misnomer, because it’s dominated by the US market centred on the annual meetings of the AEA.

I moved here from within Australia, and a few others have done so, but we haven’t hired a truly local person (that is, one with no need to move to take up the job) in years.

SusanC at #46:

“But Universities really aren’t rational utility-maximising agents. They are inefficient bureacracies, with a general principle that procedural rules must always be followed, even when doing so will cost the University a significant amount of money.”

In my experience, universities operate with a general principle that procedural rules must always BE SEEN TO BE followed, which may be something quite different. This usually allows scope for achieving any pre-selected outcome desired by the administrative hierarchs, as some of the examples above attest.

What is hard to overcome is the arbitrariness of the process. Will they create a position for the spouse of the newly hired provost? Oh sure. Will they do the same for the talented early career faculty and his/her talented spouse? Hardly. In general, spousal hires will mostly benefit older and already established academics.

CharlieMcMenamin at # 80

Some facts:

There are university departments of mathematics in Britain where the British citizens are in a minority of the academic staff. One department I know has a majority of Russian speakers – people who are (or were) citizens of states of the former USSR.

A recent advertisement I know of for an entry-level lectureship (assistant professorship) in a science subject at a British university had over 80 qualified applicants (ie, having a PhD in the relevant discipline). This list was short-listed down to 6 candidates – citizens of Britain, the Netherlands, Germany (2), Hong Kong and the USA.

Not a global market?

Only 80?

I think that people are operating under a misconception, namely that there is some generic absolute quality standard for creative academic work. The problem that you face is that you end up comparing people whose work, in practice, is simply quite different – and that the people involved are simply talented in different ways.

In astronomy, for example, there are observers, instrument-builders, and theorists. There are people who work on planets, stars, galaxies, or large scale structure and all other things in between. It’s a lot like trying to evaluate artists. In this circumstance a spousal hire would usually be someone who is quite good – people get diverted out of highly competitive fields unless they’re talented – but perhaps not in a area that you would have identified as a priority.

We’ve been on both sides of this (getting spouses in our department and having spouses in other departments), and they’ve been extremely successful for us. Truly creative and smart people frequently partner with other creative and smart people.

Here’s another way to think about the merit issue, perhaps more useful than the ‘trailing spouse’ frame. Suppose you have two jobs to fill and you get an application from a two-person team on the condition “take both of us or neither”. The two-person team is better than any two people you could hire separately, even though it might be possible to get someone better than one member of the team.

In this case, appointing on merit requires that you hire the team, but appointing on *individual* merit means you’ll fill the positions separately.

@piglet – my limited experience suggests the opposite. Spousal hire is most common for early career appointments, for the reason suggested above – lots of couples who have met in graduate school, and are both looking for an academic job. With older academics, the spouse is less likely to be looking for an academic job. That’s partly a generation thing, but mostly, I think to do with the fact that peoples lives change over time.

The points made by CharlieMcMenamin (#100) are valid. It is certainly not the university’s responsibility to sort out the joint-search constraints of the applicants. Rather, I think the relevant issue is that, as a number of posts suggest, it may be advantageous to the University to provide spousal accommodation as it increases its ability to attract and retain talent. American universities appear (increasingly) to recognise this (inclusively in the context of the junior academic market); European universities, it seems, not so much.

Salient: I’ve been waiting for you to chime in on this post to criticize the obsession with merit on display based on our previous lengthy conversation about merit. As you can see, I share your preference to elevate other values over individual merit with regards to this issue.

100
Because it is in the best interests of academic institutions to do so.

105
An obsession with merit also drives another bad phenomenon in faculty hiring (at least in science). Everyone wants only the best candidate. Determining the best candidate is hard and somewhat subjective. Many people don’t trust their own judgement. So what happens is that one candidate will start getting a few top offers. When that happens, everyone else decides they want that person too. So one person sweeps up all the offers, while the remaining well-qualified candidates have to sit around and wait for that person to decide and start turning down offers.

Marc @108 wrote:

If you’re hiring in History, and there is a spouse who is in Chemistry, then it is the Chemistry department that decided whether they want to make an offer.

This is exactly how it played out in a faculty search for which I was on the committee (my department has graduate student representation on faculty search committees). The person who was our first choice had a spouse who was an academic in another field, and would not come unless the spouse could get a job at our university in the relevant department. The other department said no, we can’t make room for the spouse, so our preferred candidate went to another university that did hire the spouse.

As to the “obsession with merit” I think it is a function of a few factors. If we get 100 applicants for a job we want to think that the person we hire is not a dud. It seems counterintuitive not to end up with someone really, really good, not merely qualified. A lot of effort goes into that process of selection. Also, the person might be with you a long time. Smart departments can hire spousal teams with two brilliant people who wouldn’t otherwise have come. In doing so they are not lowering their standards for merit. But I also think it a mistake to dismiss concern with merit in this kind of hiring practice.

There’s a distinction to be made between (a) hiring a star and also hiring the spouse, in order to seal the deal with the star and (b) hiring both halves together.

The former is not uncommon; the non-star spouse is often given a second-class non tenure title like “senior lecturer”.

The latter also happens quite frequently; for example, two new PhDs who meet and marry (or partner up) while in graduate school, and then go out onto the market as a joint product, as it were.

If they are being hired in a city with multiple universities, they can end up in different places. Recently in the NYT wedding announcements was the case of two about-to-finish graduate students. The bride was completing a PhD at Harvard and this fall will be an assistant professor at MIT. The groom was completing a PhD at MIT and this fall will be an assistant professor at Harvard. Now, [I]that[/I] is an efficient labor market at work.

In my own deprtment I’ve seen it twice, once as a husband/wife team of academics, (and who were hired as a couple, not as one following the other, but definitely equals. Not so coincidentally, they also brought in a married couple assistants/lab managers who have followed them through through (now) three universities) and a department head, one of whose conditions for accepting the position was a job for her spouse at the University (in an entirely different, non-academic department). In both cases the spouse was more than qualified for the position.. (and the department head has moved on, as has her husband, who now has a position at the new university she’s working for…)

But this was at department head/endowed chair levels of entry. New professors? Not a chance…

Regarding CharlieMcMenamin @100: my impression is that in Europe Britain has an “global” job market for academics, but other European countries (say, Germany, France, Italy) much less so, and that one reason is the language (everybody speaks English, but how many non-Germans speak German?).

Leederick@106:

It’s not really our place to consider the value of social norms against corruption or nepotism, or to worry about maintaining these.

This just assumes the conclusion: that spousal accomodation is a form of corruption or nepotism. In certain cases, it certainly could be. But if we consider the typical case, the value to the employer of creating a position for a spouse may be very close to the actual cost in salary. I think the burden is on those who oppose this practice to describe what is so corrupt about it. This is fundamentally different than a powerful person in an organization using their influence to get favors for another that are entirely mismatched with that other person’s skillset. It is a way of hiding a person’s true level of compensation and creates negative externalities for the people having to work with the inadequate hire. In reasonable cases of spousal accomodation we are discussing qualified candidates and simply using the hiring metric of “providing both halves of a couple meaningful employment opportunties” instead of the metric of “most qualified candidate based on our fairly arbitrary normal selection process”. As I indicated earlier, I think this practice is very likely to be socially beneficial.

#121 I think the burden is on those who oppose this practice to describe what is so corrupt about it.

How do you know:
(i) In the ‘typical case’ of spousal accommodation the benefit to the employer roughly equals out to the salary?
(ii)That most academics that pair with their co-academics pair off with people of obviously similar skills, or skills which just so happen to magically match the requirements of the academic’s employer?
(iii) The normal selection process is ‘fairly arbitrary’ or, in any event, less objective than simply giving people a job because of who they live with?

So ,no, I think the burden is on advocates of spousal accommodation to show that it isn’t nepotistic.

#123 – So ,no, I think the burden is on advocates of spousal accommodation to show that it isn’t nepotistic.

It’s certainly not possible to do this in general. As people have pointed out, it is certainly conceivable that some such hires are nepotistic.

However, in most cases where this happens, there is an independent investigation of the qualifications of the spousal hire. As Marc at 108 mentioned, when the spouse is in a separate department, the other department normally is offered the candidate as a potential hire and decides whether they think this person is likely to be qualified for tenure in the department.

It may be that in some cases there is unfair nepotism at work. The practice as it’s set up right now normally requires an investigation to show that each individual case is not nepotistic. To ban the practice entirely on the other hand, I think one would need to show that it is nepotism in a very substantial number of cases.

(I don’t know what “a very substantial number” would need to be here. But the point is just that current evaluation proceeds on a case-by-case basis, which doesn’t require the general proof that Charlie McMenamin wants.)

124. Yes, it isn’t nepotism. I do though think it comes perilously close to corruption, and where not that, unfairness. All the demonstrations and arguments here that the notion of merit is elastic/that value may be added in various ways/that etc. etc. (arguments with which I agree) don’t IMO justify the “spousal accommodation” hiring of a spouse unless they actually are more or less qualified as other competing candidates. After all, spouses aren’t the only people who may find it difficult to move city for a job. Single parents, or other single people caring for elderly relatives, may well find it equally different. And they are likely to have less money.

mpowell, reasonable spousal accommodation — open competition for existing posts, with a ceteris paribus preference for a spouse — is of course fine; who could not support that?

More concretely, if I were a person of ethnic minority status, who had interviewed for an academic job, and the job was subsequently given to the white spouse of another hire, please explain how you’d prove that wasn’t racial discrimination?

“but there is nothing intrinsically corrupt in paying someone via benefits (hiring the spouse, in this case), rather than hard money.”

How are you going to report that benefit to the tax authorities? Perhaps not corruption, but it could be a form of tax avoidance or even fraud.

Norwegian, the same thing can be said about having a nice office, a secretary, light teaching duties, interesting colleagues, smart students…

I’m a lot less comfortable with a job offer for the spouse of a bigshot being treated as additional benefits or compensation for the bigshot. It sounds vaguely patriarchal, it makes less sense than just offering a higher salary to the bigshot, and it seems like it would doom the spouse to an unproductive position without substantial duties, which shoots the “recoup productivity losses” goal in the foot.

“All the demonstrations and arguments here that the notion of merit is elastic/that value may be added in various ways/that etc. etc. (arguments with which I agree) don’t IMO justify the “spousal accommodation” hiring of a spouse unless they actually are more or less qualified as other competing candidates.”

And I don’t think anyone has argued that spouses should be or are hired if they aren’t “more or less [as] qualified as other competing candidates.” As someone upthread pointed out, the department that’s hiring the spouse, whether it’s the same department that is making the focal hire or a different unit, has to agree to the hire. In my experience, departments won’t agree unless the spouse is above the bar, however that is defined by local practice, because there are simply too many long-term costs to the department to doing so. (Even if the line is “free,” a fiction in academic budgets if ever there was one.)

Could departments “do better,” by hiring two unrelated and unattached faculty? In some cases yes, in other cases no. Moreover, it’s extremely hard to predict in advance, because the total value added of two faculty is based on two conditional probabilities of future success that are unknown and noisy. But for many universities, the alternative is to go back to disproportionately hiring single faculty or faculty with stay-at-home spouses, which in practice still means disproportionately hiring single men or men with stay-at-home wives. After all, as a engineering friend heard in her department’s search committee meeting *this year*: “men are just easier to hire.”

It’s a very long time ago (#14) that I made clear that I’m (a) British, not North American and (b) not an academic, although partnered with one. I also (#67) made clear that my normative standards for these things are the norms of the UK public and voluntary sectors.

Now, I’m not suggesting this is the only perspective or only standard from which to look at these things. Certainly, I accept that the sheer distance involved in North American re-location – and, by extension, academic re-location in the Anglosphere if not globally – confuses matters at the edges. But it doesn’t do any more than dent the basic principles I subscribe too.

As a non academic, I can’t quite believe the strength of feeling of the arguments put forward to defend which seem to me to be basically an ‘old Spanish practice’ (as the Right used to say of Fleet Street Union defined procedure). No one has convincing put forward any parallels from other industries. I know, for example, that the BBC World Service doesn’t create jobs for partners of its overseas correspondents even if they happen to be journalists as well. (Though some may independently find ancillary or freelance work – equivalent to non tenure track if you like – in the country where the correspondent is based, perhaps even for the WS itself.)

Tell me: why should academia be different?

Charlie @ 139 (ish…)

The UN routinely pays an additional allowance to staff posted to foreign climes if they are married and taking their partner. Would it be better or worse if the UN required the partner to work for that allowance…?

(FWIW my gut feeling is much the same as yours, BTW, that spousal hiring in academia is at least a little odd; those people saying “they create the position for the new hire” don’t seem to have considered where the money for that position has come from; presumably, by eating up one department or the other’s headcount, and so depriving another non-married person of a job. You can be cool with that or not as you wish, but the money doesn’t appear out of thin air. Unless you’re Harvard…)

CharlieMcMenamin at #139:

“Tell me: why should academia be different?”

Since finding a post for a spouse in order to attract a desirable candidate to take a position is rational, self-interested (utility-maximising) behaviour by universities, the onus is surely on you to explain why other employers do not do this.

“Spousal hires are almost never for existing positions – they fall under a category called “target of opportunity” more typically. It isn’t that the spouse is getting an open position that someone else could compete for; it’s that the university is willing to create a new position for a sufficiently qualified pair of scholars.”

This seems incomplete. What departments are we talking about that have so much money sitting around doing nothing special that they can just create an entire new position for somebody without it negatively impacting someone else? Are these teaching positions? So they are creating entirely new courses, not taught by anyone else, and are expecting that they will have sufficient students? That seems unlikely. Are these research positions? So they are creating entirely new research positions, filling an actual need in the department but which was going to lie fallow if this person didn’t come along? And the money isn’t going to come from anyone else’s allotment, nor subtract from anyone else’s headcount? I’m not even sure I would believe that from Yale or Harvard, and it is completely unbelievable for any normal university. What happened to all the worrying talk about budget and staff cuts we have been hearing about?

These types of arrangements are almost certainly, for all but the very richest universities, taking someone else’s job. Maybe that is totally defensible and totally ok. But let’s not fool ourselves about what is happening. The spousal hire is getting a plus for being married to someone important to the university. They are getting the job over someone who wasn’t attractive enough to someone important to the university.

“Since finding a post for a spouse in order to attract a desirable candidate to take a position is rational, self-interested (utility-maximising) behaviour by universities, the onus is surely on you to explain why other employers do not do this.”

Other employers don’t typically do this because it creates horrible morale issues with co-workers who suspect that the person wasn’t up to snuff.

132: “Obviously, this is more possible for some careers than others; there is little need for a criminal prosecutor in a foreign embassy.”

Oddly enough, I know of two US prosecutors, a married couple, working in an embassy. They are with the Department of Justice, helping the host country with judicial reform. They would not have come if both had not been offered positions.

The US Foreign Service has spousal accommodation all the time, as a matter of routine and (I think) as a matter of policy. Many embassy jobs that are posted will have a “family preference” noted in the listing, saying that family of current employees are preferred. The alternative is a diplomatic corps comprised of single people.

Multilateral organizations vary widely in their degree of support. The OSCE was recently looking for a chief deputy in Bishkek (I think the posting asked for 15 years of increasingly responsible experience, so it was hardly a low-level position). Their family support was no moving allowance, no flight costs for family, no reimbursement of school costs. That there would be no spousal accommodation of any sort went without saying at that point.

Marc, it is hard to square this idea of such abundance of departmental resources and central administrations easily passing out the large amount of money a new hire represents with all the discussions we’ve seen around here of declining departmental resources, administrative tightfistedness and the plight of masses of PhDs applying for every conceivable position.

The stories don’t add up well, so appealing to authority on “It is annoying to have people with zero knowledge of how positions are funded” just doesn’t wash with me.

Again, it may well be that spousal hires are fine in some cases. The best case scenario would be that the two people hired, taken together, represent as well or better than the university was likely to do with two people hired separately. It may very well be that *on balance* the good outweighs the problems

But all this talk of positions that don’t take any opportunities away from anyone else because they spring from the head of Zeus, don’t need to be open to competition, and somehow don’t cost anything sounds like self-deception.

@149: It costs the university more than a single hire, so it’s done primarily to attract people who are regarded as exceptionally good. It’s also the case that these people tend to be in the stronger departments in the university. This leads to an interesting dynamic, quite different from the implied “spouse got a job that they couldn’t compete for”: namely, that the spousal hire is frequently *substantially* better than the university could have gotten in an open search. The reason why this is very common is that, for most universities, individual departments vary a lot in quality. It’s probably not a coincidence that the successful models tend to be in universities with precisely this profile: people hired into departments that are unusually strong for that university (and thus ones where the university is willing to invest more), and spouses hired into average departments at the same place (who strengthen the department and are glad to be there.)

There is a case where spousal hires are more of a problem: if they work in the same department. This can create bad dynamics in governance, promotion, and hiring, as couples almost always vote together. Especially for small departments, this also is likely to impact the balance of subjects studied.