A Double Dilemma: 2-Professor Families

She taught Russian. He taught German. They were married, had a 1-year-old child and a big problem: The two college professors lived 3,000 miles apart.

Larissa Rudova was an assistant professor at Pomona College in Claremont. Her husband, Hans Rindisbacher, had followed her there from Reed College in Oregon, but spent two years looking in vain for a full-time teaching position in the Los Angeles area.

Desperate, he accepted a job at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. To turn it down, he said, would have ended his career.

“For me at that point, it was either take it or get out of the profession,” Rindisbacher said, recalling the agonizing choice that split his family, turning his marriage into a series of late-night telephone calls and causing his tiny son, Sasha, to “sort of forget about me. . . . It was a terrible time.”

That terrible time is becoming more and more common in academia. An increase in women who are earning PhDs--added to many colleges’ desire to diversify their faculties--has made the intense competition for teaching positions even tougher and has brought a thorny new management problem: “partner accommodation.”

Scholars, it seems, tend to couple with other scholars--on this, college administrators around the nation agree. But what to do if your school can only hire one of them? Increasingly, higher education experts say, this difficult question--and its often painful repercussions--is forcing schools to reevaluate not only who, but how, they hire.

“These cases can be agony--and their number seems to be growing,” said Robert Weisberg, vice president for recruitment and retention at Stanford University, where he’s heard couples simply wish for two jobs in the same time zone. “Everyone knows that all major universities deal with this. But if there is a [how-to] formula, please call me at home immediately and give it to me.”

At UCLA, where deans say they have lost top scholars to other institutions because they had no jobs for their partners, the sentiment is much the same. For the most part, said Norman Abrams, vice chancellor for academic personnel, “there are no rules for how we deal with this. We ‘ad hoc’ it.”

Slowly, however, colleges are beginning to find formal ways of addressing what some call “the two-degree problem.” Institutions such as the University of Michigan and Oregon State University have created programs designed to help couples find employment. Some colleges allow husbands and wives to “share a line,” each working part-time in the same department.

And a few schools have tried using couple-friendly policies as a recruiting tactic. Arizona State University recently began rewarding departments that cooperate in dual-career hiring situations. The reason, said Associate Dean Wendy Wilkins, was strategic.

“We see ourselves at ASU as a university that’s ascending into the ranks of the great,” she said. “We don’t have the same reputation as Stanford or the Ivy League, but when we go out to recruit, we’re often competing with them. . . . If we can accomplish a partner hire, we might beat out another institution that has a better national reputation.”

Wilkins has created a detailed flowchart titled “Building a Better Spouse Trap” that offers creative recruiting suggestions. If a department likes the partner but has no position available, for example, she suggests “mortgaging” a position--in effect, hiring now by promising to forfeit the next opening.

The idea, she says, is paying off. Last year, Arizona State wooed a senior historian away from the Claremont Graduate School in part because the scholar’s spouse also was offered a job.

Couples in other professions also face the two-career dilemma. But academia has a more difficult time accommodating dual careers because of its tenure system, which virtually assures top professors jobs for life. Beginning in 1994, Congress banned colleges from enforcing mandatory retirement policies--now, said one college dean, “people can go on teaching until they’re 92.”

As fewer professors retire, fewer tenure-track positions open up. At Pomona College, for example, not a single professor has retired in the past three years. That makes it harder for couples to find one job, let alone two in the same place.

The situation poses daunting challenges not just for couples, but for universities, which often face a host of practical and philosophical obstacles when they try to pry new positions out of already tight faculty rosters.

College administrators say they are not blind to the needs of job-seeking couples, but they are constrained by harsh financial realities. Given the growing demands on shrinking budgets, administrators cannot afford to hire a partner in one department “when a position is sorely needed somewhere else,” said Laura Mays Hoopes, vice president and dean of Pomona College.

Administrators have little power--beyond offering limited financial inducements, such as research support--to persuade individual departments to hire the partners of sought-after professors.

And Weisberg of Stanford says such incentives, while they help, are almost never enough to push a hire through.

“The autonomy to decide who one’s colleagues will be and to control the shape and internal dynamics and breadth of the department is far more important to most departments than anything that can be made up for materially,” he said.

In a time when few colleges are expanding their faculties, there is more pressure on departments to hire carefully and well. And that, too, makes it tough for couples. For no matter how accomplished a mate may be, a stigma often comes with being the “tag-along.”

“When you become a ‘spouse,’ you’re no longer a psychologist--you’re a problem,” said Laura Carstensen, a professor of psychology at Stanford who recently went on the job market with her new husband, a psychology professor at Northwestern University.

Carstensen is a renowned expert on emotional development in old age. But when she interviewed at one college that was interested in her husband, she was met with suspicion.

“It immediately knocks at least 10 to 15 points off your batting average in people’s perceptions. You can’t be that good: You’re a spouse,” said Carstensen, who opted to stay at Stanford after her husband got a job there too. Both also were offered positions at the University of Michigan.

Weisberg, the Stanford vice president for recruitment, acknowledged that Carstensen is right. And at many schools, he said, “there is a terrible fear of being seen as the department that helps out by hiring the spouses.” Such a department, it is assumed, naturally will be less rigorous.

No wonder scholars often worry about when in a job interview--if ever--they should bring up their significant other.

“If you mention it upfront, will they still consider you? If you don’t mention it until after you get the job, will you be perceived as hiding something?” asked Rachel Levin, a biologist who shares a position and a half with her husband at Pomona College. “I’ve seen people play it both ways and lose both ways.”

Jon Eggert, a physicist who is married to a Chinese history scholar, made the mistake of being honest when a recruiter from a college he was applying to telephoned for a chat.

“At some point it came up: ‘What does your wife do?’ So I told him. Then I didn’t get the interview,” Eggert recalled. Later he saw the recruiter at a conference. “He said they had really wanted to [interview me], but since there wasn’t anything for my wife, they didn’t bother.”

Theodore Mitchell, UCLA’s vice chancellor for academic planning and budget, says such an attitude is cause for alarm.

“There really is a potential [for institutions] to not deal with this by not recruiting or not offering positions to people with whom one would anticipate a spousal entanglement,” he said. “Aside from being illegal, it would be immoral. And yet the incentives are all there.”

Couples have to live with the fallout. Eggert will begin teaching this fall at the Colorado School of Mines. His wife, Nancy Park, holds a tenure-track position at Vassar College in New York.

“We’ve only spent three months where both of us have lived in the same house and earned a salary--and we’ve been married eight years,” said Park, who gave birth to their first child, a daughter, last month. “I’ve come to the conclusion that you can’t have it all.”

For some couples, fulfilling work makes up for difficult circumstances. Consider the two distinguished scholars of the brain who teach at UCLA and UC Berkeley. Both tenured professors, they have commuted throughout their 16-year marriage, taking turns shuttling between their house in Los Angeles and an apartment in Berkeley. Their work is so rewarding, they wouldn’t have it any other way.

But long-distance horror stories abound: ego battles, resentment, divorce. Children complicate matters, as one spouse suddenly finds out what single parenting is really like. And during the few stolen weekends and vacations together, couples report one activity tends to take precedence over all others: paying bills.

Lynda S. Bell, a history professor at UC Riverside, and her husband, Guangyuan Zhou, own three cars--two in Southern California and one in Maryland, where he teaches history at the University of Baltimore. They maintain two residences, pay for lots of child care for their 4-year-old, Margaret, and have killer phone bills.

“Last year we made $82,000, but you wouldn’t know it,” said Bell, who has maintained this bicoastal existence for 18 months. “You can’t win for losing.”

Bell and others see the problem largely as generational. The professoriate is changing, not only in its gender and racial makeup, but in its priorities. As a group, younger professors no longer fit the traditional ideal of the ivory tower academic--single-minded and committed only to scholarship.

But the ideal still exists, especially in the minds of some older male professors--the very people, according to younger faculty, who often have the most difficulty with “partner accommodation” and have the power to block it.

“I’m supposed to be a professional person, period. Because that’s the way men have defined themselves,” said Bell, who adds that some of her older male colleagues at UC Riverside have been less than sympathetic about the pressures she’s faced as a de facto single mother. “Of course, those men have lives [outside of work] too, but they have someone else to manage it: their wives.”

For today’s young faculty member, said Gail Mahood, a Stanford geology professor, “the days of having a ‘faculty wife’--a wonderfully educated, charming woman who stays home and runs the social life--are gone.” In their place: a legion of two-career families with very different needs.

Still, even couples that have suffered long separations are optimistic that higher education as a whole gradually will become more sensitive to the concerns of two-professor families. They see the smattering of colleges with formal couple-friendly policies as a hopeful sign and predict that others will catch on.

Change is complicated, these couples acknowledge. Letting a couple share a position, for example, raises a host of new issues for an institution. Should a half-time professor who is up for tenure be required to complete as much research as a full-time professor? (Most colleges say no). What if one partner gets tenure and the other doesn’t? What if the job-sharing couple breaks up?

Despite the complexities, Eggert, the Colorado-bound physicist, said, “The policies will change. It’s got to happen--after all, you don’t want to have the entire junior faculty unhappy. The schools that do change are going to get the good people. And as soon as there are 50 schools doing that . . . the Harvards will have to, too.”

But the couples will have to be flexible also, sharing positions, perhaps, or accepting lectureships or other non-tenure-track jobs.

Hoopes of Pomona College says one ideal solution might be to provide spouses and partners of new Pomona professors with transitional employment, perhaps for one year.

“They wouldn’t be unemployed, would be affiliated with the college and would have enough money to do a serious job search in the area,” Hoopes said. But such a bridge position, she stressed, would be temporary and not tenure-track--not what many academics have set their hearts on.

The alternative, however, may be far more daunting. During their 3,000-mile separation, Rudova and Rindisbacher, the professors of Russian and German, say there were times when they felt stretched to the breaking point. Rudova was so exhausted from juggling work and caring for their infant son that she sometimes locked the door to her Pomona College office and napped on the floor.

Rindisbacher, child-free at Swarthmore, had more time to himself. And the contrast between their lives made their late-night telephone conversations awkward.

“He was free to have his night life. I was jealous of it in a way,” Rudova said. “My experience was mostly constant fatigue, a lot of work, a lot of frustration. But of course, dreams of being together.”

The dreams came true in 1994, when Swarthmore offered both of them jobs, though Rindisbacher’s was not a tenure-track position. Pomona College countered with tenure-track jobs for them both. Afraid of losing Rudova, colleagues even brought her flowers.

Last fall, for the first time, both husband and wife began teaching at the same place: Pomona College. They bought a house and have had a second son, Misha.

But in academia today, nothing is a sure thing--at least until you get tenure. This fall, Rudova is up for her final tenure review, while Rindisbacher will be considered for contract renewal--the first of several hurdles before he is considered for tenure. The couple are hopeful but also wary, given what they’ve been through.

“Let’s say Larissa doesn’t get tenure--or I don’t get renewed,” he said, for a moment imagining the worst: another job search, another possible separation.

“So there we are again, crossing our fingers, hoping for the best.”