Two-Body Problem: Dual-Career-Couple Hiring Practices in Higher Education, The

Academe, Jan/Feb 2005 by Jacobs, Jerry A, Winslow, Sarah

The Two-Body Problem: Dual-Career-Couple Hiring Practices in Higher Education

By Lisa Wolf-Wendel, Susan B. Twombly, and Suzanne Rice. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003

In The Two-Body Problem: Dual-Career-Couple Hiring Practices in-Higher Education, Lisa Wolf-Wendel, Susan Twombly, and Suzanne Rice tackle a timely issue-how academic institutions assist dual-career couples in finding employment for accompanying spouses and partners. Our own research reveals that dual-career couples are widespread in academia. Data from the 2000 census indicate that 87 percent of all female full-time faculty and 56 percent of all male foil-time faculty have spouses employed full time, most of-whom are professionals or managers. Moreover, our analysis of data from the 1999 National Study of Postsecondary Faculty reveals that over 20 percent of full-time faculty (22 percent of women and 20 percent of men) have spouses employed in professional positions in higher education, with over 13 percent married to an employee of the same institution. Policies directed at dual-career couples are thus clearly applicable to a large proportion of faculty members.

Wolf-Wendel and her colleagues fill an important lacuna in the literature, examining dual-career policies from the perspective of institutions and policy makers rather than the individuals who utilize them. Drawing on a survey of 360 institutions of higher education and on case studies of five colleges and universities, the authors present a detailed and multifaceted portrait of institutional policies and practices. While the authors envision an audience of administrators and policy makers, this book will no doubt be of interest to a larger audience of scholars interested in faculty employment and work-life issues, as well as to academics facing their own two-body problems.

The book begins by detailing the results of the authors' survey. While the vast majority (80 percent) of colleges and universities in their sample report that spouse and partner accommodations were important, only one-quarter report having such policies. Of those that do, less than one-half (42 percent) have written policies, with larger, richer research universities leading the way. Geographically isolated schools are more likely to pursue some faculty accommodations, especially regarding offering faculty positions to both spouses. While their goal is to make an institution competitive in attracting and retaining high-caliber faculty members, such policies are not without their challenges. The authors identify issues including cross-department communication problems, concerns over departmental autonomy, and questions regarding the quality of an accompanying spouse or partner. Institutions without policies often lack the resources to implement such programs. The authors present a complex picture of the actors-administrators, standing faculty, and new recruits-and issues-equity, legality, autonomy, institutional success, and personal happiness-involved in creating and implementing dual-career accommodation policies in academia.

The book's subsequent chapters flesh out this portrait in greater detail, drawing on the case studies. Each chapter focuses on a particular policy and practice: relocation services, non-tenuretrack or adjunct positions for accompanying spouses, split and shared positions, shared advertising, and tenure-track positions for accompanying spouses.

Relocation services are the easiest form of accommodation service to fund and administer. Such programs range from networking programs to writing letters of introduction to accompany the faculty spouse's job applications to offering nonemployment information, such as information about schools and doctors in the local area. Employing accompanying spouses in non-tenuretrack facility positions, although not the ideal situation from the perspective of accompanying spouses, was the most common accommodation practice uncovered by the authors.

In discussing shared and split positions, the authors conclude that, if handled properly, such positions are beneficial to both institutions and faculty couples-essentially allowing institutions to hire two faculty members for nearly the price of one and giving academic couples the ability to live and work in the same place. Such positions are not without their disadvantages, with the two most common complaints of shared-position faculty being salary and workload, since both partners often end up working nearly full time.

The authors refer to two tenure-track positions at the same institution as "the holy grail of dual-career accommodations." While the most desired form of accommodation, this is also the most complicated, most controversial, and least available. Even when the stars of two-position accommodation-"luck, timing, and cooperation, combined with the needs of an academic unit and the qualifications of the spouse or partner"-align, the resulting situation is not without controversy, as the relative rarity of such positions heightens both attention to and backlash against them.