University Helps Faculty Spouses Find Jobs

Harvard and its teaching hospitals have invested $200,000 to spearhead an effort that would help the spouses of faculty members find jobs in the region.

The New England Higher Education Recruitment Consortium (NE-HERC), a online partnership of 36 academic institutions, was launched over the weekend, specifically to accommodate dual-career searches of spouses and partners.

In trying to address this challenge, the NE-HERC offers directories of regional resources such as childcare, lifestyle, and relocation services.

The NE-HERC website had 12,000 visitors yesterday, and already has over 300 registered users.

“In the past and even today, when we appoint a new faculty member who has a spouse that needs an academic and/or professional position, deans and their faculty affairs staffs have had to call around to other institutions to see if they had positions available that might work for these individuals,” wrote Harvard’s senior vice provost for faculty development and diversity, Evelynn M. Hammonds, in an e-mail. “This is a very time consuming process. We believe that the HERC tool will help make that process easier since faculty and professional positions will be posted on the site,” she added.

The dual-career issue has become an increasingly relevant topic in the past decade or so, according to the director of the NE-HERC, Jacqueline S. Hogan, who is a project manager within Harvard’s Office of Faculty Development and Diversity.

“There has been a shift in the way we are doing recruiting, in that we are not just recruiting individuals—we are recruiting families,” she said.

Hogan said that as of 2003, 67 percent of working couples were dual-income couples. Between 1980 and 2003 the number of working couples grew by almost eight million, or 31 percent.

Economics Chair James H. Stock is largely responsible for recruiting the department’s professors. He agreed that coordinating spouses comes up as a subject in virtually every hire. “It is a statement about more women being candidates for junior and senior faculty appointments than they were several years ago,” he said.

Lecturer on Government Rachel M. McCleary, who is married to Warburg Professor of Economics Robert J. Barro, said she is on the job market herself because she’s not on a tenure track at Harvard. McClearly said the consortium is a positive first-step, but doesn’t solve the dual-career problem. “I don’t want the institutions to think that [the consortium] absolves them of responsibility,” she said.

McCleary said she thinks academic institutions should act more like corporations—being more flexible in terms of keeping families together, and helping them find housing and employment opportunities.

HERC was first created by a group of northern California schools. Southern California and the New York-New Jersey areas have followed suit.

The website can be accessed at www.newenglandherc.org.