<p>How can that be uniquely taxing on marriages between academics when all sorts of other duel career couples have the exact same problem? </p>
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<p>Oh, good grief. I know far too many professors to believe that the criteria is “being the best in the world” at what they do in terms worth bragging about. Unless by “best in the world” you are including campus politics, bringing in money and kissing donors behinds. </p>
<p>When my husband was up to be promoted at approx 7 years, more than half of the officers in his class were not promoted. Is there a less than 50% that a person will recieve tenure at their university? </p>
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<p>Those are choices that all professionals must make. Some make the choice to become established first in their careers. I had my kid when when were very young, just starting out. The trade off is that we’ll be 40 & 44 when our kid leaves for college. If we’d waited, we’d have more resources but less energy. It’s just life and it is by no means exclusive to professors. </p>
<p>I know of no other group of professionals who seem so unhappy with doing the work they dreamed of doing nor who seem to so firmly believe that theirs is a special kind of hell.</p>
The difference is that someone who doesn’t receive tenure loses his job.
I think those who are lucky enough to land tenure track positions are happy with their jobs. The issue discussed in the article is that so few PhD’s will ever have the opportunity to do the work they trained for.</p>
<p>It is unique because there may be a few dozen faculty positions in the country that open in one person’s area every year. The chance of a position opening for your spouse in their area in the same locality, AND you both beating out dozens of other candidates for the two positions is not high.</p>
<p>Frankly, it is tougher and more competitive to get a tenure track faculty position than to become an army officer.</p>
<p>Still not unique. I’m just worn out with this thread. If you don’t know how it works for, say, med students, then I can see why you are so convinced that it’s a unique burden for academics. </p>
<p>As for me, I’ve only moved eight times in 20 years since I got married due to my spouses career, so it’s been easy-breezy for me to keep my career in high gear. Same for my friends who are lawyers, accountants, doctors, teachers and so on. Goodness knows our marriages would have crumbled under the unique burden of married academics. </p>
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<p>I don’t know where to start with this sad, little sentence except to tell you that the Army is not the military. It’s a branch of it. That someone is a military officer does not tell you which branch of the service they are in. </p>
<p>Ironically, my husband is in a doctoral program with the intention of becoming a professor. I just hope he can muster up the strength and competitive nature, what with being an officer for 20+ years being ever so much easier and requiring no competition worth mentioning.</p>
<p>Interestingly, not being able to GET a tenure position is an outcome of the tenure system, anyway.</p>
<p>The more successful you are in any field, the more difficult it is to find a position.</p>
<p>It’s a shame, though, to hear that a doctorate in the humanities is seen as a handicap in the world outside academia. I really just have not found this to be the case, at all.</p>
<p>Oh please. That happens to dual career couples in all kinds of positions. The couple where she wants to practice Big Law in the city and he wants to tend to the family’s wine business. The couple where her residency specialty is best on the East Coast and hers on the West. The couple where she’s a broadcast journalist and she’s got to hop from small market to progressively bigger markets. Dual career couples make these kinds of decisions all the time, where one person’s career is privileged for a while – that’s just LIFE. What is so unique and special about academia in this regard? How arrogant and out of touch with reality to suggest that it’s a problem that’s So Very Special and Unique to The Life of Academia.</p>
<p>So? How’s that any different from the broadcast journalist trying to move up from a small market, and whose spouse has to trail? Surely you’re aware that in many fields, there are only a handful of openings in any given year, if any. </p>
<p>This is life, and academics seem whiny and out of touch if they think it’s a special / unique problem.</p>
<p>I cannot say how unique the academic two-body problem is, but it is a real concern. When I was in grad school, there was the phenomenon known as “the faculty wife.” She was supposed to be on hand to organize social get-togethers with both colleagues of her husband and of his students. She was expected to be easily moved when he got a job in a different college and different institution, where she would carry on doing the same things as she had done previously: being social secretary, SAHM, party organizers, and so on. At the time, the women who actually taught were often single women. A friend of mine whose husband was hired by a LAC was told by his administration to buy sturdy furniture because they would be expected to host swarms of undergraduates.
When women began to enter academia in larger numbers, that was also the time when teaching jobs began to become scarcer because of the great influx of males in academia in the previous years.
And women with Ph.D.s tend to marry men with Ph.D.s. Many marry people in the same field; this makes finding jobs for both more difficult. There cannot be many departments in need of two profs both specializing in English literature (even different periods and topics) at the same time. Even when the spouse is not in academia s/he is likely to have a well-established career. Just as it is difficult for a couple on the job market at the same time to land two jobs in the same general area, it is difficult for universities to recruit profs with well-established spouses unless they are able to come up with an equivalent position for the “trailing” spouse.
The two-body problem is a topic that comes up all the time in academic circles. If there is whining, it is on the part of both job-seekers and universities that do the hiring.</p>
I thought officers could be re-considered for promotion after a certain amount of time had passed. Sorry if I am mistaken about this – please set me straight.</p>
<p>There do seem to be different market forces at work. The military has been complaining of shortages, while there is an obvious oversupply of PhD’s, particularly in the humanities.</p>
<p>Is there truly an oversupply of PhDs?<br>
Consider how the admit rates keep dropping at the most selective schools. Look at the student:faculty ratios at large state universities. If the country had its priorities straight and our wealth were not being squandered on other things, we’d be building new universities. We’d be hiring more faculty to make the state flagships, at least, truly competitive in every respect with the most selective private schools. Instead, the most sought-after schools are at least 100 years old. They were built when America was still a third world country.</p>
<p>No different from what hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of wives have done throughout the years to support their husbands’ careers … Manage the home load, be social secretary / party organizer, and move at will. And if she had career aspirations of her own, she needed to put them on hold or accept a considerable “step down.”</p>
<p>I surely hope this isn’t news to people in academia. Are they that isolated that they are unaware that many jobs always involve some sort of sacrifice on the spouse’s part, whether it’s frequent moves or being tied to one area of the country, or the spouse not having full freedom? </p>
<p>Next I’ll expect to see a thread that a major problem in academia is that after dinner, someone has to clear the table and do the dishes – oh, all the stress it puts on academic households!</p>
<p>Yes. Just like med students marry one another, and then it becomes a problem when spouse #1 gets accepted to residency in X City and spouse #2 gets accepted to residency in Y City.</p>
<p>Honestly – why is this perceived as <em>worse</em> for academia than for anyone else? Do people in academia not get that many people have two-career conflicts? Or do they think that theirs are somehow worse?</p>
<p>I don’t know about “people in academia”. The author of the “The Big Lie About the ‘Life of the Mind’” is the one who originally made that assertion. Considering that he uses the most hackneyed Nazi symbolism to describe the eeeevil plot of college professors to waste the lives of their students.</p>
<p>I don’t think you are belaboring anything mackinaw.</p>
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<p>I agree with the difficulty of finding a tenure track job in academics. What I’m trying to get at is that the author seems to think there is a choice between going to graduate school or some other lucrative profession a person is also considering. I don’t think it is like that, people drift in their 20s. Being in graduate school and developing one’s mind even if it doesn’t result in a PhD is at least a productive use of one’s time. I went to graduate school in my 20s because I didn’t like my job and I was restless. If I had been able to come up with something better I would have done that instead, but I didn’t have any better ideas. I didn’t get a PhD but I’m not sorry I went and it led me to the job I have now.</p>
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<p>That’s exactly what I’m saying. She is working in her chosen profession which she never expected to get rich from anyway. She probably wouldn’t want her brother’s job even if she could have it.</p>
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<p>LOL sorghum.</p>
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<p>Yes, we have some of those problems where I work. It’s hard for a manager without an advanced degree to be managing someone with a PhD, but you know what, they both just have to deal with it. And any PhD who expects more because of his degree is the one with the problem.</p>
<p>The point has been made many times that the two-body problem is not unique to academics. I can’t think of any marriages that I know of that have two ambitious people with high powered jobs. One person usually takes a back seat.</p>
<p>Are you serious? I know tons of people with two high-ambition jobs. Plenty of dual-doctor, dual-lawyer, hot-shot-business careers. Except they consider whatever personal sacrifices or trade-offs they make to be just part of life, where nothing is guaranteed, and not evidence that they entered a Very Special Field. </p>
<p>I manage someone with a PhD and have in the past. Didn’t think twice about it – that was simply the best person for the job as it stood. What on earth is the big deal about someone in the work force managing a PhD? Why would it be more “difficult” for me, with half an MBA to my name, to manage someone with a PhD versus someone without? Good lord, this whole thread is so incredibly navelgazing.</p>
<p>It’s a different set of quid pro quos. People go into academia because they love the life of the mind blah blah. They figure they’re not going to earn big bucks, that they’ll have to move where the job is, etc. Doctors, attorneys, CEOs will get the big bucks but know they’ll be sacrificing personal time. Those in the military have frequent moves and deployments with all the disruption and danger thereof, in exchange for work that they love with a close-knit community. </p>
<p>For whatever reasons, students going to professional school seem to have a better idea about what the job market holds (though not lately among the newly minted attorneys I know; they’re not finding jobs, and they’re saying this isn’t what they expected) than do a lot of humanities PhDs. Maybe the humanities students are just more naive. Or maybe they’re being sold a bill of goods. Maybe a little of both. Regardless, it’s a problem that should be fixed.</p>
<p>Well, maybe it’s not really about the life of the mind, anyway, but the “fact” that people who pursue PhDs and post docs have a certain type of arrogance which comes from having always been “at the top” and maybe a condescension towards the other skill sets in life.</p>
<p>I have both an MA and a PhD, in separate subjects. I have worked for people with a BS or BA because they have practical world skill sets I do not have. Husband has been incredibly successful with a BS and he has hired many MIT PhD’s who couldn’t manage thier way out of a paper bag without the assistance of the more practical people around them. He pays them very well, but he makes more. It’s true. And I’m certain the people I worked for, with far less academic education than I have, made more than I was making, though I didn’t care, honestly, as I seriously wouldn’t have been able to do thier job.</p>
<p>However, never once in my many years have I ever found it difficult to get a job because of my PhD. Not ever. And I do not consider it to have been wasted time, at all.</p>
<p>edit: You know, Einstein was working as a clerk when he made his major breakthroughs. Wallace Stevens was selling insurance when he was busy writing what many consider to be the best modern era American poetry ever written. Emily Dickenson wasn’t even publishing. What did Herman Melville do again? Because he wasn’t making a living as a writer. The “life of the mind” has a life of it’s own outside ivory tower academics.</p>
<p>I think maybe the doctoral students would be well served by some practical job counseling which said things like, “You can do x, y and z with this degree if you can’t find a job as a professor.”</p>
<p>The point of my post was that the flexible spouse who could relocate easily is no longer the reality. It is not impossible for doctors or lawyers to find jobs in the same city. But it has become more and more difficult for academics to do so unless they happen to be in a city with multiple universities, and even then, it has become harder. When I was a grad student (sorry to keep harping on that long gone era), Harvard could approach neighboring institutions to find jobs for trailing spouses (usually women); it no longer can do so because partly but not entirely owing to the influx of women into academia, these institutions have a greater pool of candidates to choose from on their own.
In many places, however, the situation is different, but still difficult for the second partner in an academic couple. The university/LAC where one spouse gets a teaching job is the only game in town; and universities remain concerned about nepotistic appointments, further cutting into the chances of a dual appointment in the same institution. Unlike doctors and lawyers, profs cannot hang a shingle and hope to attract customers.
The two-body problem is of course not confined to academics. H and I independently and at different times have been offered very attractive jobs that we could not take up because of the lack of opportunity for either him or me. I do believe, however, that the problem is significantly more of an issue in academia, unless one of the partners is willing to retool, which means leaving academia.</p>
<p>Academic here – neither H an academic. Things have worked out well professionally.</p>
<p>I think academics, especially in the humanities, is a challenging field be hired in, and two career academics does add trouble to the mix.</p>
<p>But there are so many paths that are difficult – acting, art, music, academics. My H is a professional photographer, and it’s not an easy path.</p>
<p>However, what are the alternatives? We are not infinitely plastic. We do come in with interests, talents, proclivities (and in my strange world, even personal destiny.) </p>
<p>We can’t remove all risk from life or insist our kids choose only the most practical professions if they have no talent for them.</p>
<p>Things change so swiftly that we can’t even know where the best employment opportunities are. And what if everyone pursued the same “practical” profession? Would there still be jobs available?</p>
<p>I hope for my kids is that in following their own paths they develop themselves enough so their skill set is a bit transferable if their Plan A doesn’t work out.</p>
<p>Learning to fight for something and be proactive is the biggest life lesson I think.</p>
<p>I have been an academic for 25 years, continually employed and tenured for 20 of them.</p>
<p>Now I have written two novels and assorted other things. Trying to get published is a lot worse than trying to get hired teaching. Academics was my “fallback” profession, LOL.</p>