Jill Fisher and Torin Monahan are working to combat a longtime issue in higher education by unveiling which universities provide the best support for academic couples.
Nearly a third of researchers have a partner who also works in academia. It’s a common occurrence, but sometimes the toll it takes on the people affected by the issue isn’t fully recognized.
“When you get an offer for a position at an institution, there’s still this hurdle that you have to jump to make it work for you and your partner,” says Jill Fisher, a professor of social medicine within the UNC School of Medicine.
Couples who work in higher education face unique challenges when it comes to finding jobs, especially if one or both partners have a specialized area of study. Sometimes duos can target areas like the Triangle that have more than one institution in a region, increasing the likelihood that each person can find a promising position. But more often, it comes down to negotiating for the creation of a new role at the same university — which can be very tricky due to a lack of transparency from potential employers and a shortage of full-time academic jobs.
Fisher and her partner, Torin Monahan, a professor of communication within the UNC College of Arts and Sciences, have been navigating the issue together for decades. To tackle the topic on a bigger scale, they conducted the first national study comparing universities by their couple-friendly status and built the Partner Hire Scorecard, a website that provides rankings and relevant resources for each institution on the list.
“It can be helpful for people to know that they might as well not even apply to certain jobs if they know the institution won’t work with them, and instead point them in the direction of universities that are hospitable to academic couples,” Fisher says.
Navigating the roadblocks
Fisher and Monahan admit that as far as academic couples go, they’ve been successful — and lucky — in making things work for their careers and relationship.
“We met in graduate school in Upstate New York,” Monahan says. “We landed at Arizona State University, then Vanderbilt, then UNC-Chapel Hill. We were fortunate to find tenure-track jobs together right away.”
Each institution on their CVs represents an especially challenging time in their careers. If one person has an opportunity, will the other have the same prospect? How should they approach the hiring process? Should they be upfront about their relationship status or hide it until presented with an offer?
Academic couples may also face bias when being evaluated by hiring departments. Oftentimes the secondary hire is viewed as less desirable than the primary hire.
“The myth that one partner is a lesser academic is just not the case,” Fisher says. “It should be viewed as an opportunity for universities to get two strong academics as opposed to one.”
There were no formalized manuals, case studies, or organizations to provide guidance on how to navigate these situations or effectively compare universities against each other — until now.
Exploring the problem
Wanting to create a formalized, evidence-based resource for academic couples in the U.S., Fisher and Monahan formulated a plan to evaluate all 146 R1 universities — those with the most robust research programs — to narrow the scope of their study and focus on institutions most likely to encounter or recruit duos in academia.
Their team began collecting evidence from publicly available information on R1 university websites like policies and procedures, archived documents, and even decades-old meeting minutes.
“It was an all-hands-on-deck experience of finding the materials and determining what they meant,” Monahan says. “It was not a cut-and-dry process by any means.”
“There was strategic ambiguity,” Fisher says. “Very few institutions were clear about what they do and how they do it. And 17 institutions had literally nothing on their website about partner hiring, which shows how difficult the job search process can be.”
But there were also helpful findings. Their study, supported by a National Science Foundation grant, shows that some institutions are very open about the process of creating a position for partners.
Providing the guidance
Fisher and Monahan found that 82% of public universities created faculty positions of some sort for partners, double the rate of private universities. They also found that geographic location makes a difference, with at least 75% of universities in the western, southern, and midwestern regions of the country supporting academic couples.
Their findings are documented on the Partner Hire Scorecard website they created to provide a snapshot of each institution and its offerings. And their ranking of universities is already making an impact. It was covered by Inside Higher Ed and The Chronicle of Higher Education.
“Some institutions are really proud of their ranking,” Monahan says. “The University of Maine was ranked second and issued a media release to celebrate their partner friendliness.”
As a top-tier research university, UNC-Chapel Hill was also included in the ranking, coming in at number 63 out of 146 and scoring positively for creating faculty positions.
“Carolina does the critical thing of creating tenure-track faculty positions,” Fisher says. “And when you look around campus, there are clearly many academic couples, so the University has policies and procedures in place and actually follows through with them.”
Fisher and Monahan hope their scorecard is not just a guide for academic couples, but encouragement for universities to look at what they could be doing better.
“These institutions are competitive,” Monahan says. “By creating a different way of rating how they stack up against each other, the study can serve as an intervention to nudge those that aren’t doing as well to improve their processes, helping all of us who have partners in academia.”
Jill Fisher is a professor in the Department of Social Medicine within the UNC School of Medicine and a member of the UNC Center for Bioethics.
Torin Monahan is a professor in the Department of Communication within the UNC College of Arts and Sciences.