“Marketplace”, a daily show about money, the economy, and the intermingling of business and personal lives, presented a short piece on how the desire for a life of academic pursuit, and the desire for a life together with another, can come into conflict. On tonight’s program, reporter Jane Lyndholm presented a short piece on the challenge of the two-career household [1]. In physics, we call this the “two-body problem”. Jodi and I raced into the house from our car to catch the story, which centered on the ongoing choices in the lives of two married academics.
The piece covered some of the major issues in the two-body problem. Does one of the two give up their career for the other? If you choose a dual-career path, do you try to live apart or wait to find jobs together? What about children? Certainly, these are issues that Jodi and I, and many of our peers, discuss frequently. The piece also pointed out the flip-side of the dual-career household: universities and colleges are starting to realize that often more enters a job decision than just a big name, a big grant, or a big salary. Sometimes you’ve got to factor family – and, more to the point, the humanity of the individual – into the equation.
Recently, I attended a panel discussion of “getting your first faculty position” at the Jacksonville APS meeting. In my opinion, the whole affair was bleak, bleak, bleak. Representatives from admissions offices and Dean’s offices, as well as people who’d recently obtained faculty positions, were present (both in the panel and in the audience). It was clear that nobody agreed on what was a good strategy for engaging your potential employer on the issue of a spouse. Some said to wait until an offer is on the table, so that you have negotiating power. Others argued that an offer is too late in the game, beyond any flexibility in the offer process, and so dropping the hint sooner is better. All agreed that there are only a few good times prior to an offer to mention the spouse. Several argued that the university or college has no legal right to enter the spouse into the equation, unless you volunteer the issue. I came away more sad about looking for a faculty job than when I entered. Amazingly, I think none of the panelists was married to another academic, so none could actually speak with experience about the two-body problem. My own sad feelings illustrate that “flip-side” I mentioned: you want a good job, but you also want to have a real life with real love and adventure beyond the ivory walls.
Many institutions today still seem to think that they are hiring a single person, and that the “baggage” the hire tows is their own problem. Many others appear to be wising up, or have wised up, to the fact that you cannot separate the academic from the person. You cannot distinguish between the part of a person which contains the “potential Nobel prize winner” and the part which is passionate about a home life, music, art, literature, writing, or sports. We are all human, and we cannot be compartmentalized so easily as perhaps we were in the past. For many academics, in a two-career situation, we are well past the question of whether it was a good idea to get married and keep both career paths, and onto the more important question: what are institutions going to do to provide for both of us? The idea of HERCS, mentioned in the piece, is certainly one solution.
It’s probably only a matter of time before institutions start to catch up to a reality long known to physics: you cannot always solve a two-body problem by reducing it to two one-body problems.
[1] http://marketplace.publicradio.org/shows/2007/06/18/PM200706187.html
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