Higher Ed Musings 2.

How should I approach the topic of spousal hiring in academia? The practice of offering positions to spouses/partners has become so normalized at most institutions that to question the practice seems churlish and anti-family. There are a very few institutions (Harvard is one) that don’t participate, but only a few, and since the Boston area is lousy with colleges and institutions where a partner might get a job, Harvard can opt out.

The Chronicle of Higher Ed has a semi-regular column on the practice. Every time one is published I dutifully write the author, David Perlmutter, and lodge my disapproval that the pitfalls of spousal hiring haven’t generally been mentioned since this interesting piece from 2010, which is semi-critical but suggests good management can solve most problems.

There are three main arguments against spousal hiring: First is the fundamental inequity of hiring people on the basis of who they are sleeping with. Any way you look at it, this is the basis of partner hiring. It’s not how ethical institutions should operate.

Second is the secondary inequity that the person who is hired on a partner basis may not be as valuable as the primary hire. This is not always true — it is literally true that some of my closest friends are partner hires and brilliant. But if we’re taking a hard look at inequities, the fact is that hiring a person largely on the basis of their marital relationship is not putting academics first.

To elaborate on these first two — the champions of partner hiring emphasize recruitment. It is easier to recruit top faculty to an institution if you make it a family package. So the thought pieces and advice columns on partner hiring are all about the how, not the why, which is that faculty hiring is complex bureaucratic over-regulated system. Higher ed has fairly stringent rules about hiring and tenure — there have to be postings and search committees and forms and references and it’s really really hard to jump from one institution to another. Institutional geography is destiny. So as long as universities are going to have unwieldy hiring practices, spousal hiring will continue. No university wants to be thought of as anti-family, though hiring practices designed for individuals on the basis of fairness and merit must, as a rule, turn a blind eye to family.

Under these circumstances it seems easier to be single and yet for dual career couples it is twice as easy to get a job — both partners go on the market and whoever gets an offer negotiates for the other.

So putting aside the two inequity arguments, the third and most important problem with spousal/partner hiring is that it keep universities from dealing with the too-bound-up-together relationship that develops between faculty members and their institutional home. Even without the abrupt voting and culture shifts that often follow dual hires, it is hard to achieve sustained excellence when hiring takes so long and firing is impossible. There are rare departments that make this work (I am overseeing one right now) but most departments would be substantially more healthy if the unhappy people could more easily leave and happier people be brought in, if a unit didn’t have to “make room” for a partner as part of a negotiation, since faculty positions might turn over with more regularity.

A moratorium on partner hiring might force the entire higher ed sector to look at the barriers to a freer flow of faculty between institutions, which may also allow a freer flow of ideas and discoveries.