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Work vs. Family in Academia: home

The ‘Two Body Problem’ in Academia: Success, Failure, Ambivalence, and Collective Action

By Janelle S. Taylor

What follows are the (slightly revised and expanded) remarks that I delivered November 20, 2003 at a panel on "Work versus Family in Academia" at the AAA meetings in Chicago, which was organized by Kari Olsen and Sabrina Chase on behalf of the graduate student section of the Society for Medical Anthropology. Panelists were asked to do several different things: talk about firsthand experiences, give practical advice, reflect on issues of work versus family in light of our own research, and more. I suspect that, as with work versus family matters in general, those of us who try to "do it all" will often end up feeling like we haven't done anything particularly well -- but we plug along anyway, and just try to do the best we can.

Mine is in many ways a very typical story, but with an atypically happy ending. I am married to another professor, not in the same field as me; we have two small children, now aged 2 and 7; we spent five years holding down jobs thousands of miles apart and constantly on the job-market seeking a better solution; after many near misses we finally both ended up with positions at the same university in a place where we are happy to live. I do feel like I have learned a lot along the way, and for the most part the things I learned were things that nobody ever had explained to me. Here, I am going to try to pass along to you some lessons from my own experience, which I hope you might find useful. Some of the issues that academic couples face are not particularly unique to academia, but others are: in particular, because of the national job-market and the highly specialized nature of hiring, it is very difficult for two academics to find jobs in the same geographic region. Of the many work-versus-family issues in academic life, that is the one I will talk about here. Keep in mind, of course, that mine is a very partial and in some ways peculiar perspective on these matters; you should also seek out advice and information from other people with other experiences and views of the issue.

First I'll talk about success, and then I want to talk about failure.

Success

The question I imagine many people want me and the other panelists to address, with some urgency, is -- how can I succeed in reconciling my own personal work versus family in academia type of issues?

Before I get to the practical tips that I would like to offer you, a quick reality check: If you are intent on an academic career, and if you have a significant obligation to someone who is not willing and readily able to pick up and move to wherever you happen to find work -- and that obligation needn't necessarily be marriage or a long-term love relationship, it could just as well be a commitment to care for an ageing parent, for example, or a disabled sibling -- then you are in for a lot of stress, anxiety, anger, and resentment. Unless you are able to recognize this, talk about it, and fight the necessary fights, you stand a good chance of ending up miserable one way or another.

If you and the person you are obligated to are both academics, and want to find jobs together, here are some suggestions that I hope you will find useful in your efforts to work out your particular situation successfully:

Be the best scholar you can be. That is, after all, the only reason to be in this business at all. Write good articles, and publish them in good venues. Don't wait to do this until you are finished with your degree, and don't sit around and wait for your advisors to tell you to do it. In today's job market, you need to write good articles and publish them if you want to have a chance at getting a job, or being able to move from your current position. If you want to find a position together with your significant other, he or she needs to do the same. No-one will be able to make a strong case for you unless you have proven your worth and your potential as a scholar by writing and publishing excellent work.
If you already hold a job, even a temporary one, be the best colleague and teacher you can be to the people who are around you now. Even if you want to leave, you might not be able to; and even if you do leave, it's never a good idea to burn bridges behind you.
Be as straightforward as you can with the people around you about what you want, and what you are doing. If you have a job and want a job for your spouse, say so. If none is forthcoming (which is overwhelmingly likely) go on the job market again, and explain to your chair and colleagues why you feel you must do so. If they are reasonable people, they will understand your predicament. If you are lucky enough, as I was, to have a wonderful dept chair who is an advocate and an ally, they will support you in your job applications elsewhere and they will at the same time keep pressing doggedly to try to arrange what you need at your present institution. You can help them make that case by doing your job really well. Think of it as small-scale politics: you want to marshal as large a group of people as possible who want you to stay and will work hard and creatively to try to make that possible. You want your department chair, all of your colleagues, and other people outside your department at the institution to all be begging the deans to keep you. If you make yourself unpleasant or don't do your job well, you can hardly expect people to go to bat for you in that way.
Remember that your own interests are not the same as the interests of the people and institutions you are dealing with. Maintaining clarity on this point can be harder than you might think; some combination of loyalty, uncertainty, and inertia can easily lead you to confuse your institution's interests with your own. You will be given many explanations and reasons why nothing can be done for you, or not as much as you want, or not right now. This does not mean that people are secretly conspiring against you; chances are they are not. They just have their own legitimate interests and concerns, which are not the same as yours. Don't let the limitations on their scope of action become limitations on your own hopes and goals. Don’t rule anything out ahead of time, even if it’s less than what you are aiming for, because you may not end up having that many options to choose from, but also be clear that you will need to try to generate options for yourself, and in general this means you will need to apply for jobs elsewhere if your situation cannot be resolved promptly and satisfactorily where you are now.
When to mention the partner/spouse issue in job applications: if you do not have a job and are applying for one, wait until you get an offer. I'd guess that partner and spousal issues come up in just about every search nowadays, and with just about every candidate -- but it's always a huge headache for search committees, department chairs, and deans. If you're the one they want to hire, then they will probably do their best to help you work something out -- but until there's that level of investment in you, nobody wants to hear about your problems. When you do get an offer, right then is the moment to press as hard as you can for what you need -- and remember that the department chair who is trying to hire you is not your adversary in this, but potentially your most important ally. Any kind of spousal accommodation will generally require the commitment of some resources from higher levels within the institution, and your department chair will never have as much leverage to try to secure anything for your spouse after you have accepted the offer. And vague assurances don't mean much; you need to have such commitments in writing.

If you already do have a job and are applying elsewhere to try to work out your personal and family situation, I would say so right up front, even in your letter of application: there isn't much point in going through the whole job-search process only to face the same problem in a new place. It's not legal for people to ask you about such matters in an interview unless you raise the topic yourself, which you can do by mentioning in your letter that you are applying for jobs elsewhere for personal and family reasons. If you have provided such an opening, and if they are very interested in hiring you, then they may be able to get a head start on trying to work something out.
Play for time, and be persistent. What doesn't work out immediately might work out in two years, or three, or four, or in my case five. You may, of course, decide at some point that the turmoil, heartache, and/or separation are not worth enduring any longer. That is a perfectly reasonable and respectable decision, though it may prove to be a difficult one for you. Remember that academia is only one small cultlike part of the big wide world. If you are a talented and energetic person, chances are you can find other meaningful and rewarding paths in life.
Don't whine. Whining is an occupational hazard of academic life, or maybe more accurately it is among the unhealthy personality traits that graduate school tends to nurture and magnify. But if you have a problem to work out, then you need allies, and whining about how maltreated you are isn't the way to win them, even if everything you say is true. Whining is also debilitating for the whiner; remember that you do have agency, and you are in charge of the decisions you make, even if all of the options from which you're choosing seem kind of lousy and full of difficult compromises.
Don't expect much guidance from advisors or mentors, because nobody really knows how to handle any of these things, you'll have to make your own judgments. Seek advice from people who are closer to the issues, because they have been facing them recently. One good source of advice and information is the jobs section of the Chronicle of Higher Education, which features some very good columns, including one titled "Balancing Act" that specifically addresses work versus family issues. Although a subscription to the Chronicle is required to access most parts of their website, www.chronicle.com, the jobs section and these articles are freely accessible to all.
While you're working on resolving your own individual situation, also direct a little bit of your energy into collective efforts. Get involved in your professional organizations -- the AAA, or one of the sections to which you belong, or the AAUP, or others -- and/or in other groups working to address broader issues that are of concern to you, such as affordable childcare, etc. You are too busy? Well, so is everyone else. But if everyone waits until they have secured tenure to get involved in collective efforts, how is anything ever supposed to change? You can write and talk all you want about the politics of this and that, but if you never take part in collective action you are living out a kind of politics that may be quite different from what you preach.

So, those are some thoughts, based on my experience these past few years, on how to try to work out a 'two-body problem' successfully. And I hope that you all will.

Failure

But while individual success is what we're all interested in, I think it's very important that we also talk about failure. Academic careers in general, and the lives of academic couples in particular, are overwhelmingly prone to downward mobility, disappointment, and bitterness -- in a word, failure. It waits around every corner, it lurks beneath every rock, it's running up behind you with knife in hand every time you let down your guard.

Many graduate students never finish their degrees; many of those who do finish never get jobs; many of those who do get jobs end up in places they don't want to live, or at institutions they feel are beneath their expectations; many of those who do end up with jobs they feel are worthy of them nonetheless never achieve the degree of prominence as a scholar that they always imagined they would; and even those few who end up at the best places and winning the respect and recognition of their peers may turn around at age 45, or 55, or 65, and find that the parade isn't following them anymore. Their topics are no longer fashionable, their work is ignored, their accomplishments forgotten, their star forever eclipsed.

I think that an acknowledgement of failure has to be an important part of any discussion of work versus family, for several reasons.

First, it points to certain structural features of the profession that really need to be addressed. Anthropologists as a group, like most other academics and unlike doctors and lawyers and some other professions, have not taken steps to limit the number of people we admit to the profession so as to ensure greater job prospects for new ph.d.s. Even within those other professions that do behave more like guilds, ability to control conditions of labor is declining, because there too, broader political and economic shifts that go by name of neoliberalism have served to undermine collective structures, and shift vulnerability and risk downward to individuals. This is the big picture of the conditions of employment against which individual dramas of work versus family play themselves out. Why are so many ph.d.'s competing for so few jobs? Because our institutions are too dependent on the cheap labor of graduate student TAs, or too hung up on the prestige of being able to claim to be a graduate program. It's worth pondering whether the AAA should act more like a guild and limit entry into the profession --- or at the very least, perhaps we should follow the lead of some other professional associations, like the American Philosophical Association, and draft an official letter that every graduate program would be required to send to every applicant to graduate school, warning them of the difficult job prospects they will face. Now that might not be the best or the only step we could take -- in my more satirical moods other possibilities suggest themselves, new rituals to be incorporated into graduate training, where graduate students publicly accept vows of poverty and chastity and symbolically marry the profession.

But really my point here is to suggest that anthropologists need to work collectively to address these broader contexts. Each one of us, at the same time that we forge ahead on our individual career paths, needs to be actively engaged with our profession and our institutions and our various other communities as well.

A second reason that it's important to acknowledge the centrality of failure to academic life, is because individuals making difficult compromises, and weighing personal commitments against professional investments, need to understand that academia is a love object that rarely loves you back. Academic success can happen, and when it does it feels great, but -- it is very fickle, and it slips away quickly. It won't keep you warm at night, and it might not be there to comfort you in your old age. Keep this in mind as you make your difficult choices. And know also that choices you make and compromises you reach in an effort to reconcile work versus family may well be seen by some in academia whose good opinion you prize, not as the considered choices that they are, but as simple “failure.” In other words, failure gets radically individualized.

Ambivalence

And now that I've mentioned success and failure, I'll close with just a few words on ambivalence. I think that there can be no simple solutions to work versus family problems in academia, because there is no easy way to reconcile the fundamentally social and collective obligations that we call family, with the fundamentally individual quality of “excellence” as it is understood and performed in academic life. Even beyond the question of whether a particular potential spousal/partner hire measures up in terms of “excellence,” many in the profession have very real and legitimate concerns about fairness and intellectual integrity. Fairness becomes an issue when a person's status as the spouse or partner of someone else gives them an otherwise unearned edge in a competitive job market. Fairness may also be an issue when professors who are single feel that undue consideration and resources are given to couples – as one single friend asked me, “Is the university going to pay for me to fly out to California for the weekend with a lover?” Intellectual integrity becomes an issue when a department expands through spousal hires, accruing topical and areal specialties in a more or less random fashion, rather than in a manner dictated by the intellectual and curricular needs of the department and the institution.

Solutions to the “two-body problem,” therefore, are neither simple nor obvious, on personal nor institutional levels. As anthropologists, however, we are not without resources to turn to, to try to situate individual lives within social and political and economic contexts. And as academics, we all like to think that we are smart and creative people. Here’s a proposal: Let's do something really smart and creative, and try to live up to this self image not just individually but also collectively.