Tenure Tracks Stifle Couples

Harvard and other top universities are searching for new ways to accommodate academic couples searching for tenure-track posts, a Harvard faculty recruitment official said at a panel discussion yesterday.

More than 50 people attended the event, which featured two successful “dual-career couples” who had each managed to land academic jobs in the Boston area.

In recent years, Harvard has lost several prominent tenured professors because their spouses could not hold another position at Harvard or another nearby institution. Star economics professor Caroline M. Hoxby ’88 headed west for Stanford earlier this year when her husband, who had spent most of his career at Yale, received an offer from the California university.

Laura G. Fisher, associate dean for faculty development in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), said institutions like Harvard have been focusing on “recruiting families, not individuals.”

“We try to be very responsive to issues of dual-career couples,” Fisher said. “However, we will not, cannot, and should not create jobs.”

Panelist Lisa E. Wolf-Wendel, a University of Kansas professor who has studied career issues facing academic couples, said that professors often cite their spouse’s situation when they leave or refuse tenured posts.

That seems to be the case at Harvard as well. Two years ago, FAS extended 36 tenure-track job offers. Fourteen of them were refused, and at least half of those who turned down offers noted that their spouses could not find jobs in the area, The Crimson reported last fall.

Assistant professor of history Ian J. Miller and his wife, E. Crate Herbert, a fundraising officer at the Harvard School of Public Health, shared their recent experiences in the job-search process. The couple wanted to remain active both as professionals and as parents of a now three-year-old son.

“What Harvard did remarkably well was listen,” Herbert said. “Harvard asked good questions and acknowledged that this was a family decision.”

The other couple on the panel, Sangeeta N. Bhatia and Jagesh V. Shah, who are junior faculty members at MIT and the Harvard Medical School, respectively, said that universities and couples may be better off if they address dual-career issues directly.

“It can be risky to be up-front,” Bhatia said. “But we really felt that our number-one priority was to solve our two-body problem well, meaning that we both had jobs that we were excited about individually.”

The event was organized by Harvard’s Office of Faculty Development and Diversity, which was created to improve Harvard’s performance in recruitment and retention.