When Scholars Come in Pairs

Edward Witten, a young Princeton scientist with an informal standing offer to join Harvard's Physics Department, is in a tricky situation.

A former junior faculty member at Harvard. Witten left the University three years ago when he was not promoted to tenure. "At the time, we weren't quite sure what his promise was, and we were just making two other appointments in his field," recalls Department Chairman Richard Wilson.

"Since that time, the work he's done certainly justifies our optimism." Wilson continues "But there's a problem. He only wants to go to a place where his wife can get a job."

Witten is a textbook illustration of a syndrome Harvard officials call one of the thorniest features of academic life today. The rising number of two-career marriages has caused personnel problems in many occupations, but in none more than in academia.

An academic can usually count the number of job openings in any field on one hand with fingers left over. Finding a position in a region where one's spouse can also gain employment is therefore extraordinarily hard.

Universities, too, are finding that the growing phenomenon hinders their recruiting efforts. Few factors deterring a scholar from coming to Cambridge are more powerful than a comfortably employed spouse.

"It's an extremely difficult problem," says Dean of the Faculty Henry' Rosovsky "We have lost a number of candidates for just this reason"

Rosovsky and other Faculty officials say they make what efforts they can to explore job options for a scholar's spouse, calling around the Boston area and exploiting whatever connections they can in cases of academic couples, thus becomes unusually difficult Certainly Harvard cannot guarantee a position for every candidate's husband or wife "Just because you want to hire spouse A. historian, doesn't mean that spouse B. an economist, is attractive to your economics department." Rosovsky explains.

"One department may often suggest that another bend its standards," he adds "But those suggestions don't go very far."

Bearing out the dean's words. James A Davis, chairman of the Sociology Department, reports. "I've got a letter on my desk right now another department is interested in A. and the question is, is Sociology interested in B?"

The answer, says Davis: "B will be considered strictly in terms of how much Harvard needs B--A could have a Nobel Prize and it wouldn't matter. Once you start hedging like that, you start hiring well-connected of nice old people and Harvard alumni."

Still, Davis has spent a good deal of time this year job-hunting for the spouses of sought after sociologists. At the start of the year, the department had three offers outstanding, all to scholars whose spouses are employed. One is an English professor, another an accountant, and the third a dermatologist. "You could almost set up a little community with those six people." Davis observes.

"University Hall and the department did everything they honorably could to find them jobs," says Davis. "I think in each case we worked out reasonably attractive opportunities for the spouses."

But two of the scholars proceeded to turn Harvard down, and some professors are gloomy about the prospects of luring the third. Stanford's Nancy Tuma. "Her husband has tenure--why should he take a risk and come here when everyone who has tenure these days is holding on for dear life? says Professor of Sociology Orlando Patterson.

For his part, David says that job options for the other two sociologists wives was not the determining factor in their decision not to come to Harvard "I don't think either of their scales upped on the spouse matter."

One professor who readily acknowledges that his choice of universities was shaped by his wife's professional life is Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, a former member of Harvard's Physics Department who joined the University of Texas's faculty in January.

In the fall of 1980. Weinberg's wife accepted an attractive teaching offer at the university's law school, and he left Harvard 18 months later to join her.

"As more and more women get into the academic world, that poses problems which I think are signs of health in our society," he concludes. "In the past, the problem was that they weren't allowed to have careers suitable to their talents. The problems we that they weren't allowed to have careers suitable to their talents. The problems we have now are much healthier. It makes life interesting--it shakes things up."