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Family Matters
Not so long ago, the offer of a Yale faculty position would make most academics uproot their families for a speedy relocation to New Haven. But in the era of two-career couples, a job for the “trailing spouse” can make or break the deal.

October 1998
by Bruce Fellman

When professor of pharmacology Jack Cooper was being considered for a faculty slot at the Medical School in the late-1950s, his interviewers left one topic conspicuously out of the job discussions: No one asked about his wife’s professional ambitions. “It was assumed I’d be a stay-at-home mom, so they didn’t have to worry about me at all,” recalls Cooper’s wife, Helen. “We just accepted it.”

Once the family was raised, Helen went on to receive a doctorate in art history from Yale in 1986 and is now curator of American paintings and sculpture at the Art Gallery. But she describes both Yale’s exclusive focus on her husband’s needs and her own acceptance of the practice with some retrospective irritation. “They can’t do that anymore,” she notes.

Nowadays, of course, it is no more possible to assume that a wife will simply follow a husband’s career path than it is to assume that the “trailing spouse” will necessarily be female (or, for that matter, that a couple is married, or even of different genders). These days, with two-career couples the norm, recruiting a new faculty member has become a family affair. “We often spend more time working out a deal with the spouse than we do with the person we’re trying to hire,” says Bryan Wolf, chairman of the American Studies department.

Wolf’s assessment is echoed at virtually every university across the country, but it has a special urgency at Yale. According to Charles Long, Yale’s deputy provost, coming up with creative solutions to spousal concern has become “one of our highest priorities.”

Not the least of the reasons is that Yale, unlike many universities, lacks a tenure-track system that gives promising junior faculty members a reasonable expectation of lifetime employment as tenured professors, and thus offers spouses the kind of stability necessary to pursue their own professional interests. In contrast, when a tenured position becomes available at Yale, the University casts a worldwide net to find the best scholars in a particular discipline. Moreover, these are the very people who are likely to have been at another university long enough to have developed strong family, community, and professional ties—and therefore hesitate to leave for fear of not replicating those ties in New Haven.

“In the old days, anyone would come to Yale,” says Long. “But now, senior-level scholars don’t move as easily. They’re far less willing to disrupt the lives of their spouses and their children just so they can move up in the academic pecking order. In addition, we find we’re competing for people whose home institutions have given them special privileges, such as housing arrangements, a release from teaching, and very high salaries.”

All Yale professors—even the most senior ones—teach undergraduates. Indeed, faculty members frequently cite the opportunity to work with such a high-caliber student body as one of the University’s attractions. And while salaries at Yale are competitive, no one, says Long, is being recruited with the kind of break-the-bank compensation packages that some schools have reportedly used to attract academic superstars.

Nor, it turns out, is money enough. Professorial perks notwithstanding, decisions about the acceptability of a job offer are as likely to revolve around the availability of suitable housing, good schools, and work opportunities for the spouse as they are to be about such standard topics as a potential faculty member’s pay and benefits.

Marilyn Adams, a professor of historical theology at the Divinity School, and her husband Robert, who is chairman of the philosophy department, represent a successful resolution of what can be the most difficult challenge for Yale’s faculty recruiters. When they were approached by Yale, both were senior, tenured scholars in the philosophy department at the University of California at Los Angeles, and neither was interested in anything less than a tenured position at another school.

“We'd had a flirtation with Yale in 1988,” recalls Robert, an expert in religious philosophy, explaining that his interest was contingent on the Divinity School’s finding a position for his wife. That didn’t happen, and since commuting from coast to coast was out of the question, they decided to stay in California.

There the Adamses would have happily remained, but several years later, a Yale professor’s retirement opened up the very slot that would have been perfect for Marilyn had it been available earlier. In 1992, she was contacted independently for the tenured position. Meanwhile, the philosophy department was looking for a chairman. Robert Adams proved to be the perfect candidate. “In a way, this was the easiest case,” Marilyn says. “There were positions appropriate for both of us, we were each considered on our own merits, and we were both hired. It was all very smooth.”

But as the Adamses first experience indicates, there are plenty of opportunities for the process to go awry. “We may already have someone in the position the spouse is right for, or we may have no job in a person’s field at all,” says Long. On one occasion, he says, the University was eagerly courting a senior academic, only to find that his wife was a prominent scholar in the history of dance, a discipline that was not in Yale’s formal curriculum.

In larger cities, the fact that the hiring institution has nothing to offer a spouse may not matter as much, because there are likely to be plenty of other opportunities close by. In both Boston and New York, there are at least 40 colleges and universities within easy commuting distance. As a result, schools in those areas can expect that the “trailing” member of an academic couple will find a suitable job. And even if the spouse is a non-academic the offerings are far more numerous. But as many Yale recruiters point out, New Haven has a problem. “There’s not much available locally,” says one, “and we’re a little too far from a major city for a reasonable commute.”

That situation will be alleviated somewhat next year when Amtrak completes its $1.5-billion upgrade of tracks from Boston to Washington and begins running high-speed trains up and down the northeast corridor. “An improved transportation infrastructure, including high-speed rail, will make for an easier commute to New York City and Boston, and it could attract new firms to New Haven, all of which will increase economic opportunities for spouses,” says Michael Morand, Yale’s assistant secretary for education and human development. “This should enhance our ability to recruit.”

Of course, many junior faculty members with spouses are already wedded to life on the road. “A number are rooted in the Boston or New York City area where their partners have better jobs than they could get here,” says Deborah Davis, a professor of sociology and recent department chair who had a hand in hiring new professors. “You need two incomes to survive, and since the reality is that the current academic employment situation is very unstable, the culture out of graduate school is to make do.”

Still, a lengthy commute can have negative effects on both family life and the collegiality that has long been an integral part of the Yale community. To keep couples closer together—and close to New Haven—the University often takes an active role in attempting to find a match for the spouse’s skills either within the University or in the surrounding area. “If the spouse is in the medical field, we do pretty well,” says Charles Long. “There are also jobs for professionals such as lawyers, middle managers, bankers, public and private school teachers, and a number of our own administrators and managers are faculty spouses.”

Yale matchmakers have even been called on to work with local realtors to accommodate spouses bent on continuing or launching independent businesses, including those that are home-based. “I’m hoping the computer age will make it easier to work at home,” says Long, noting a spate of requests to find houses with plenty of office space.

Real estate, in fact, is one area in which Yale has some distinct advantages over its big-city competitors. “We have a wide variety of affordable housing situations both in and near New Haven,” says Long, pointing out Yale’s generous housing subsidy that helps homebuyers settle in many parts of the city. “People find that this is a very pleasant place to live.”

There are also in place some creative hiring strategies to help ease the pressure of spousal employment. For instance, should a spouse rank at the very top of an academic discipline, that person becomes eligible for a “target of opportunity” program that permits the relevant Yale department to request an additional faculty slot that can be filled without conducting a search. More typical, though, is the situation in which there just isn’t a well-defined place at Yale for the spouse. “If there’s a job that needs doing and the person has the right qualifications we can, in such cases, create temporary, part-time employment on the lecturer or adjunct level,” says Long. “Often, this translates to a one-third time position for three years. It can provide a kind of foothold while the spouse looks for a more permanent job, and it can also buy time while the person obtains the appropriate credential, such as finishing a doctoral thesis or writing a book, that is required to be in the running for an academic job.”

Or it can serve as a launching pad to a more-or-less permanent, if non-tenured, Yale position. This is precisely what happened to both Michael Friedmann and Patricia Pessar.

Friedmann, who is married to sociology professor Deborah Davis, is currently listed as an associate professor (adjunct) of composition and theory at the School of Music and in the undergraduate music department. While not in line for a ladder-faculty slot, Friedmann, who also teaches piano, sees the fact that he is now working under a five-year, renewable contract as both a “serious gesture of commitment” to his career and an affirmation of his contributions.

But when the couple arrived here in the late 1970s, Yale was not so accommodating. “I was offered a succession of one-year, fill-in jobs,” says Friedmann, who also taught at the Hartt School of Music in Hartford.

In 1985, Deborah Davis was granted tenure, but she found that there was still nothing available for her husband. To compound matters, he had a permanent job waiting for him at the University of Southern California. Commuting was not an option—the couple had a 7-year-old son—so Davis, who had also been offered a tenured position in Los Angeles, let it be known that she was considering leaving Yale unless the University helped her husband. “I really didn’t expect that Yale would respond to Michael’s need for a job—the environment was quite different then—but they did,” says Davis.

The result, however, was only a series of two-year contracts, and a shaky situation that, Friedmann admits, “I took a calculated risk in accepting.” But he flourished here, winning awards for his teaching and his scholarship. After some wrangling, Friedmann was finally awarded longer contracts. “The University’s attitude has changed a lot,” says Davis.

How much it has changed is clear from the treatment accorded Patricia Pessar, associate professor (adjunct) of American Studies and anthropology who has served as director of undergraduate studies for the new major in ethnicity, race, and migration. “I gave up tenure to come to Yale, and frankly, my colleagues told me that they couldn’t imagine how a woman could give up what she'd worked so hard to obtain in order to stand by her man,” recalls Pessar. A specialist in Latin American immigration issues and refugee movements, she was at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1993 when her husband, Gilbert Joseph '78PhD, was named a tenured professor of history at Yale.

The couple had a young son, so they weren’t about to consider a commuter marriage “What really impressed me when we were at the University for Gil’s interviews was that our prospective colleagues had not only read my work, they also arranged for me to present a paper at a meeting of the Council on Latin American Studies.” says Pessar. “Admittedly, I was taking a gamble, but I could imagine having a future here that would compensate for losing the security I had at UNC.”

The gamble is paying off: Pessar started as a half-time adjunct, but her expertise—she was, after all, a seasoned scholar with an international reputation—quickly earned her a full-time position. “Right from the beginning, the University dealt well with both of us,” says Joseph. And that accommodation continues, adds Pessar, who was recently granted a year-long sabbatical, a perk that comes with a professorship but is almost unprecedented in the adjunct ranks.

Pessar’s sabbatical, which includes research trips to Guatemala, Mexico, and Brazil, is the kind of investment in her career that will “make me a more effective teacher.” It will also result in the book she needs to publish to be eligible for tenure. “Life throws you some interesting pitches, and each couple has to decide how to handle them,” says Pessar. “Yale is helping us play for the home run.”  

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