What is the price of a beautiful mind?
Universities working to woo top scholars in a competitive academic environment are discovering the advantage of the faculty two-for-one.
In addition to playing up a school's prestige and repute, partner accommodation-university hiring of the spouses and significant others along with its faculty and administration-is a commonplace practice, administrators said.
"Spousal hiring and partner accommodation is a helpful mechanism," said George McLendon, dean of the faculty of Arts and Sciences, who spoke about the practice as an effective recruiting tool. "Often we're in a situation where we wouldn't be able to bring a [faculty member] to Duke that we're actively trying to bring, if we didn't offer an intellectual opportunity for their partner."
Many female part-time faculty hires at the University are a result of partner accommodation, McLendon added.
A recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that a national faculty survey found 35 percent of male professors and 40 percent of female faculty members had partners who were also academics.
The high number of inter-faculty couples may be a reason university partner accommodation is so prevalent, said Bruce Kuniholm, director of the Sanford Institute of Public Policy and a professor of public policy and history.
"Generally, smart people marry other smart people," Kuniholm said. "In the past two years, I'm familiar with five or six cases in which Duke University hiring involved a spouse. Many times when you're trying to hire someone, they're coming as a team-when this is the case, you clearly try to find a framework for the spouse."
Jill Rickershauser, a lecturer in the political science department, met her husband at Duke when they were both pursuing graduate degrees. Universities' increasing use of partner accommodation helps early-career academics stay near their spouses, she said.
"The job market is really tough, so there's a likelihood we won't live together for the first year or two," Rickershauser wrote in an e-mail. "The good news is that universities are starting to recognize this problem."
Stanley Fish, former chair of Duke's English department and current Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Law at Florida International University, said in the Chronicle of Higher Education article that he used the strategy of keeping couples together during his tenure at Duke.
"It's such a natural," Fish said in the article. "People who are apart, bearing both the emotional and financial drain, are going to listen to you when you call them up and say, 'How would you like to be together?'"
An area of contention raised by the Chronicle of Higher Education article is whether or not hiring partners without a national search establishes an imprudent form of affirmative action that disadvantages people not married to other academics.
Kuniholm firmly denied that such a practice has been implemented at Duke.
"If the question is 'Have we tried to accommodate someone who is unqualified,' the answer is 'no,'" he said. "We've never hired anyone who we felt was underqualified."
Kuniholm added that the high standards within academic departments don't allow for any bending of the rules.
"Whomever is hired has to pass muster," he said. "No matter how much a department wants somebody, the standards are universal standards."
Provost Peter Lange said partner accommodations are by no means limited to the academic setting, and spouses of many potential faculty members are interested in non-teaching positions within the University.
"This is a pervasive issue," Lange said. "It is probably the case in over half the searches that we have [that the spouses] are not academics. Very often we find that it's much less how excellent the spouses are than how they fit [in the University.]"
Despite potential drawbacks, partner accommodation is a practice that has greatly helped Duke, McLendon said.
"Often, as a university, we have needs.... We have needs for excellent faculty to teach courses. However, we simply don't have enough," McLendon said.
"But [through partner accommodation] we can offer all the courses that we do by offering these new part-time faculty members the opportunity to teach them-and the students benefit because they can take these courses," he added.
Adam Eaglin contributed to this article.?
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