Resources for academic couples

This page is a work in progress; please let me know if you have any resources to add to it, or find dead links.

Disclaimer: this page represents my personal opinions, not those of my employer, Swarthmore College.

In the interest of furthering discussions about how colleges and universities deal with two-career couples, I offer here some links to resources on the Internet. In particular, my main focus is on policies that colleges and universities have adopted or are considering. By compiling them here, I hope to provide a resource for any institution that is considering implementing such a policy. Please let me know if you know of any institutions not included here that have policies regarding dealing with couples in the hiring process.

Similar lists and resources elsewhere

A good place to start is by looking at the results of an extensive survey of dual-career couples by Laurie McNeil and Marc Sher. The survey was targeted toward scientists, but many of the issues raised apply to other academics as well. Marc Sher also maintains a page somewhat similar to this one with information for dual-science-career couples.

Existing partner accommodation policies at colleges and universities

• Arizona State University (local copy; may not be the current policy).
• Grinnell College shared position policy (local copy; may not be the current policy).
• Michigan State.
• Michigan Tech.
• Northern Arizona University.
• Penn State.
• University of Arizona.
• University of California Irvine.
• University of California Santa Cruz.
• University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
• The University of Iowa Dual-Career Network. This program is broader than some, dealing both with faculty and staff, and with jobs inside and outside of academia. They do not give preferential treatment to partners of people currently being recruited by the university.
• University of Minnesota-Duluth.
• University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.
• University of Oregon partner hiring policy, covering both the possibility of hiring to a tenure-track position, as well as one-year appointments to give a partner a "professional landing site" from which to search for another position.
• University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Consortia of educational institutions

A number of consortia have been created, typically of schools in a particular geographical area, to make it easier for couples to conduct dual-career job searches.

• Southern California Higher Education Recruitment Consortium.
• Northern California Higher Education Recruitment Consortium.
• Academic Career Network, composed of colleges in New England including Amherst College, Connecticut College, Hampshire College, Middlebury College, Mount Holyoke College, Skidmore College, Smith College, Trinity College, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Wesleyan University, and Williams College.
• Bates, Bowdoin, and Colby Colleges apparently have an agreement to run joint job ads, though not much information is readily available. There's a little bit here (search for "couples") and here. (Let me know if you have more information!)

Institutions where partner accommodation policies have been discussed or recommended

A search of the web yields quite a number of "strategic plans" or sets of recommendations suggesting the establishment of policies for dealing with partners. Some of those recommendations are listed here:

• Harvard's 2005 Task Force on Women Faculty issued a final report recommending the establishment of a university-wide dual-career hiring program at Harvard.
• An "exhortation" by the Faculty Senate at Binghamton University for partner hiring as a way to improve recruitment and retention of women and minorities.
• The University of Nebraska apparently once had a program, since this news release indicates that it was eliminated as part of budget cuts in 2003.

Job Sharing: Personal experiences

• The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a story entitled: When Officemates Are Also Roommates: More professors face issue of how to work in the same department as their spouses, about couples who not only work in the same department, but in many cases collaborate with each other. There was also a discussion on the issue on the Chronicle web site.
• In "Shared Positions a Creative Solution for Academic Couples", Natalie Adolphi gives a firsthand account of her experience with sharing a single full-time position with her husband at Knox College.
• "And the Two Shall Be as One: Job Sharing in an Academic Department". Mark Montgomery and Irene Powell discuss sharing a position in the Economics department at Grinnell.
• Cheryl and James Keen share the jobs of Dean of the Faculty and Vice President at Antioch College. They share their experiences in "Sharing the Job of Academic Leadership".

Other writings or resources

• Writing by Susan Landau on women in science (see links at the bottom of her web page) including Universities and the Two-Body Problem, focusing on two-career academic couples.
• The book Academic Couples: Problems and Promises, (University of Illinois Press, 1997, edited by Marianne A. Ferber and Jane W. Loeb; Table of contents) is a collection of scholarly articles discussing both the historical background of the treatment of couples in academia and current research into any advantages and disadvantages faced by such couples. Some specific topics covered are issues facing unmarried couples (same-sex and opposite-sex), African-Americans, and administrators on the hiring side.
• A more recent book The Two-Body Problem: Dual-Career-Couple Hiring Practices in Higher Education, by Lisa B. Wolf-Wendel, Susan Twombly, and Suzanne Rice (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), covers similar topics.

Pages that have vanished off the web

Here are some formerly-active links from this page that no longer seem to exist. If they look interesting, you may be able to track down the text using the URLs linked below, and the Internet Archive's WayBack Machine.

• Erica Ellingson discusses her experiences sharing a position with her husband at University of Colorado. Her comments include some unique aspects of their arrangement, and her thoughts about how it's working out so far.

Comments or suggestions to Eric Jensen; e-mail me at ejensen1@swarthmore.edu;

If you know of an interesting document related to academic couples but it isn't available in electronic form, you can mail it or fax it to me at:

Eric Jensen
Dept. of Physics and Astronomy
Swarthmore College
500 College Avenue
Swarthmore, PA 19081

Fax: 610-328-7895

Last modified: Fri Mar 28 15:05:10 EDT 2008 ;

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